Pyinotify

As a System administrator, you can use it to monitor changes happening to a directory of interest such as web directory or application data storage directory and beyond.

It depends on inotify (a Linux kernel feature incorporated in kernel 2.6.13), which is an event-driven notifier, its notifications are exported from kernel space to user space via three system calls.

The purpose of pyinotiy is to bind the three system calls, and support an implementation on top of them providing a common and abstract means to manipulate those functionalities.

Dependencies

• Linux ≥ 2.6.13
• Python ≥ 2.4 (including Python 3.x)

Install

Get the current stable version from PyPI and install it with pip

# To install pip follow http://www.pip-installer.org/en/latest/installing.html
$ sudo pip install pyinotify

Or install Pyinotify directly from source

# Choose your Python interpreter: either python, python2.7, python3.2,..
# Replacing XXX accordingly, type:
$ sudo pythonXXX setup.py install

Watch a directory

Install pyinotify and run this command from a shell:

$ python -m pyinotify -v /my-dir-to-watch

Download