[PATCH v2] inotifyd: -x: new option

[Denys Vlasenko]

On Wed, Oct 21, 2015 at 11:56 AM, Bartosz Gołaszewski
<bartekgola at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2015-10-20 13:17 GMT+02:00 Denys Vlasenko <vda.linux at googlemail.com>:
>>
>> inotifyd syntax is "inotifyd PROG FILE1[:MASK]...",
>> and PROG is run with
>>
>>     PROG ACTUAL_EVENTS FILEn [SUBFILE]
>>
>> This severely limits the number of unmodified PROGs you can run
>> to achieve some useful result. For example, even cat'ting newly
>> created files to stdout can't be done by PROG=cat, you need
>> to massage argv's
>>
>> IOW: in practice, you always need a shim.
>
> I agree that the functionality of inotifyd is limited. I tried working
> with what's available.
>
> Would you be willing to accept patches that expand this applet?

Yes.

> Like
> for example being able to redirect the events to stdout instead of
> only being able to pass them as arguments to PROG? This is how
> inotifywait works BTW.

It already does that:

BusyBox v1.25.0.git (2015-10-19 04:25:25 CEST) multi-call binary.

Usage: inotifyd PROG FILE1[:MASK]...

Run PROG on filesystem changes.
When a filesystem event matching MASK occurs on FILEn,
PROG ACTUAL_EVENTS FILEn [SUBFILE] is run.
If PROG is -, events are sent to stdout.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

# inotifyd - /etc:r
r    /etc
r    /etc    ld.so.cache
r    /etc    ld.so.cache
r    /etc    ld.so.cache
r    /etc    ld.so.cache
r    /etc    ld.so.cache
r    /etc    magic
r    /etc    bashrc
r    /etc    bashrc
...