71 lines
2.9 KiB
Plaintext
71 lines
2.9 KiB
Plaintext
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Linux Directory Notification
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============================
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Stephen Rothwell <sfr@canb.auug.org.au>
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The intention of directory notification is to allow user applications
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to be notified when a directory, or any of the files in it, are changed.
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The basic mechanism involves the application registering for notification
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on a directory using a fcntl(2) call and the notifications themselves
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being delivered using signals.
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The application decides which "events" it wants to be notified about.
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The currently defined events are:
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DN_ACCESS A file in the directory was accessed (read)
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DN_MODIFY A file in the directory was modified (write,truncate)
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DN_CREATE A file was created in the directory
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DN_DELETE A file was unlinked from directory
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DN_RENAME A file in the directory was renamed
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DN_ATTRIB A file in the directory had its attributes
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changed (chmod,chown)
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Usually, the application must reregister after each notification, but
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if DN_MULTISHOT is or'ed with the event mask, then the registration will
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remain until explicitly removed (by registering for no events).
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By default, SIGIO will be delivered to the process and no other useful
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information. However, if the F_SETSIG fcntl(2) call is used to let the
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kernel know which signal to deliver, a siginfo structure will be passed to
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the signal handler and the si_fd member of that structure will contain the
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file descriptor associated with the directory in which the event occurred.
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Preferably the application will choose one of the real time signals
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(SIGRTMIN + <n>) so that the notifications may be queued. This is
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especially important if DN_MULTISHOT is specified. Note that SIGRTMIN
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is often blocked, so it is better to use (at least) SIGRTMIN + 1.
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Implementation expectations (features and bugs :-))
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---------------------------
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The notification should work for any local access to files even if the
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actual file system is on a remote server. This implies that remote
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access to files served by local user mode servers should be notified.
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Also, remote accesses to files served by a local kernel NFS server should
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be notified.
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In order to make the impact on the file system code as small as possible,
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the problem of hard links to files has been ignored. So if a file (x)
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exists in two directories (a and b) then a change to the file using the
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name "a/x" should be notified to a program expecting notifications on
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directory "a", but will not be notified to one expecting notifications on
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directory "b".
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Also, files that are unlinked, will still cause notifications in the
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last directory that they were linked to.
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Configuration
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-------------
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Dnotify is controlled via the CONFIG_DNOTIFY configuration option. When
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disabled, fcntl(fd, F_NOTIFY, ...) will return -EINVAL.
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Example
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-------
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See Documentation/filesystems/dnotify_test.c for an example.
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NOTE
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----
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Beginning with Linux 2.6.13, dnotify has been replaced by inotify.
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See Documentation/filesystems/inotify.txt for more information on it.
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