inotify_lite

inotify_lite is a Python 3.8 wrapper around inotify (see inotify(7)).

Usage

Classes

IN_FLAGS

class IN_FLAGS(enum.IntFlag)

Wrapper around the underlying C lib flags. See inotify_add_watch(2), <sys/inotify.h>, <bits/inotify.h>.

Event

namedtuple("Event", ("wd", "mask", "cookie", "len", "name"))

Maps the underlying struct inotify_event. See inotify_add_watch(2).

Inotify

Inotify(
	callback: Callable[[Sequence[Event]], Any],
	*files: str,
	blocking: bool = True,
	flags: IN_FLAGS = 0,
)

Base class for TreeWatcher and FileWatcher.

TreeWatcher

TreeWatcher(
        callback: Callable[[Sequence[Event]], Any],
        *dirs: str,
        blocking: bool = True,
        watch_all: bool = True,
        flags: IN_FLAGS = 0,
)

Watch directories. Extends Inotify and passes IN_FLAGS.ONLYDIR by default (raises if any of dirs is not a directory). The watch_all option means to watch for all filesystem events (this can be quite noisy).

FileWatcher

FileWatcher(
        callback: Callable[[Sequence[Event]], Any],
        *files: str,
        blocking: bool = True,
        watch_all: bool = True,
        flags: IN_FLAGS = 0,
)

Watch files.

Examples

To watch a directory:

def my_callback(events):
    # Just show me the event mask.
    for e in events:
    	print(IN_FLAGS(e.mask))

# Watch the home directory for successful writes.
watcher = TreeWatcher(my_callback, "~", watch_all=False, flags=IN_FLAGS.CLOSE_WRITE)
watcher.watch()