INOTIFY_INIT(2)

NAME
inotify_init, inotify_init1 - initialize an inotify instance

SYNOPSIS
#include <sys/inotify.h>

int inotify_init(void);
int inotify_init1(int flags);

DESCRIPTION
For an overview of the inotify API, see inotify(7).

inotify_init() initializes a new inotify instance and returns a file descriptor associated with a new inotify event queue.

If flags is 0, then inotify_init1() is the same as inotify_init(). The following values can be bitwise ORed in flags to obtain different behavior:

IN_NONBLOCK
    Set the O_NONBLOCK file status flag on the new open file description. Using this flag saves extra calls to fcntl(2) to achieve the same result.

IN_CLOEXEC
    Set the close-on-exec (FD_CLOEXEC) flag on the new file descriptor. See the description of the O_CLOEXEC flag in open(2) for reasons why this may be useful.

RETURN VALUE
On success, these system calls return a new file descriptor. On error, -1 is returned, and errno is set to indicate the error.

ERRORS

EINVAL
    (inotify_init1()) An invalid value was specified in flags.

EMFILE
    The user limit on the total number of inotify instances has been reached.

EMFILE
    The per-process limit on the number of open file descriptors has been reached.

ENFILE
    The system-wide limit on the total number of open files has been reached.

ENOMEM
    Insufficient kernel memory is available.

VERSIONS
inotify_init() first appeared in Linux 2.6.13; library support was added to glibc in version 2.4. inotify_init1() was added in Linux 2.6.27; library support was added to glibc in version 2.9.

CONFORMING TO
These system calls are Linux-specific.

SEE ALSO
inotify_add_watch(2), inotify_rm_watch(2), inotify(7)

COLOPHON
This page is part of release 4.16 of the Linux man-pages project. A description of the project, information about reporting bugs, and the latest version of this page, can be found at https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.