pktrain has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Dearest Monks,

I am trying to set up Inotify2 to watch for file creation in all sub-directories of a parent directory. I found this thread which explains the process for a single directory, code included here for convenience: 

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use Linux::Inotify2;

$|++;

my $inotify = new Linux::Inotify2
 or die "Unable to create new inotify object: $!";

$inotify->watch("/tmp/j", IN_ACCESS | IN_CLOSE_WRITE, sub {
 my $event = shift;
 
 my $name = $event->fullname;
 
 print "$name was accessed\n" if $event->IN_ACCESS;
 print "$name is no longer mounted\n" if $event->IN_UNMOUNT;
 print "$name is gone\n" if $event->IN_IGNORED;
 print "$name is new\n" if $event->IN_CLOSE_WRITE;
 print "events for $name have been lost\n" if $event->IN_Q_OVERFLOW;
 print "jjjj\n";

 # $event->w->cancel;
}) or die "watch creation failed: $!";

1 while $inotify->poll;

[download]

If anyone can show me how to modify this to watch multiple sub-directories, I would greatly appreciate it. I have not been able to find an example of this anywhere. Thank you kindly.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Inotify2 question: watching subdirectories
by Anonymous Monk on Feb 11, 2009 at 04:48 UTC
    Call ->watch for every directory you want to watch.
[reply]
[d/l]
      Thank you for the response. I assume the best way to do this would be to enclose the ->watch call in a foreach loop like this? 
      #!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use Linux::Inotify2;

$|++;

my $inotify = new Linux::Inotify2
 or die "Unable to create new inotify object: $!";

@site_array = {"tmp1","tmp2","tmp3"};
foreach $site (@site_array)
{

$inotify->watch("/tmp/j".$site, IN_ACCESS | IN_CLOSE_WRITE, sub {
 my $event = shift;
 
 my $name = $event->fullname;
 
 print "$name was accessed\n" if $event->IN_ACCESS;
 print "$name is no longer mounted\n" if $event->IN_UNMOUNT;
 print "$name is gone\n" if $event->IN_IGNORED;
 print "$name is new\n" if $event->IN_CLOSE_WRITE;
 print "events for $name have been lost\n" if $event->IN_Q_OVERFLOW;
 print "jjjj\n";

 # $event->w->cancel;
}) or die "watch creation failed: $!";

}

1 while $inotify->poll;

      [download]
      Thank you again.
[reply]
[d/l]
[select]
        Foreach is fine, but 
        use strict;
use warnings;



@site_array = {"tmp1","tmp2","tmp3"};
foreach $site (@site_array)
{
  print $site;
}
__END__
Global symbol "@site_array" requires explicit package name at - line 6
+.
Global symbol "$site" requires explicit package name at - line 7.
Global symbol "@site_array" requires explicit package name at - line 7
+.
Global symbol "$site" requires explicit package name at - line 9.
Execution of - aborted due to compilation errors.

        [download]
        Omitting strict temporarily, reveals 
        use warnings;

@site_array = {"tmp1","tmp2","tmp3"};
foreach $site (@site_array)
{
  print $site;
}
__END__
Odd number of elements in anonymous hash at - line 3.
HASH(0x225f14)

        [download]
        see perldata
[reply]
[d/l]
[select]

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