Problems with inotify as far as I know:
You can't do something like inotify("/") (made up API) but you have to set
up a watch for every directory you wan't to watch. That seems like a waste
of resources.
Then you get back a file name, if you wan't to report it or attempt* to
scan it you have to build a pathname yourself, which means you have to
maintain the whole tree of names in memory. Even bigger waste.
When I say attempt to scan it above I mean that we are back into the
pathanme teritorry. It is not guaranteed we will be able to open and scan
using that pathname. I don't know what inotify reports with chroots and
private namespaces, but it can certainly fail with NFS and root_squash. So
it is less effective as well as being resource intensive.
I think this is a good amount of flaws which shows inotify isn't really
ideal.
Tvrtko
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