SaltyCrane Blog

Notes on Python, Django, and web development on Ubuntu Linux

Monitoring a filesystem with Python and Pyinotify

Date: 2010-04-09 | Tags: files_directories, linux, python, ubuntu

Pyinotify is a Python library for monitoring filesystem events on Linux through the inotify Linux kernel subsystem. It can monitor when a file is created, accessed, deleted, modified, etc. For a full list of Pyinotify events see the documentation.

Install Pyinotify¶

Install pip
Install Pyinotify
```
$ sudo pip install pyinotify
```

Example¶

import pyinotify

class MyEventHandler(pyinotify.ProcessEvent):
    def process_IN_ACCESS(self, event):
        print "ACCESS event:", event.pathname

    def process_IN_ATTRIB(self, event):
        print "ATTRIB event:", event.pathname

    def process_IN_CLOSE_NOWRITE(self, event):
        print "CLOSE_NOWRITE event:", event.pathname

    def process_IN_CLOSE_WRITE(self, event):
        print "CLOSE_WRITE event:", event.pathname

    def process_IN_CREATE(self, event):
        print "CREATE event:", event.pathname

    def process_IN_DELETE(self, event):
        print "DELETE event:", event.pathname

    def process_IN_MODIFY(self, event):
        print "MODIFY event:", event.pathname

    def process_IN_OPEN(self, event):
        print "OPEN event:", event.pathname

def main():
    # watch manager
    wm = pyinotify.WatchManager()
    wm.add_watch('/var/log', pyinotify.ALL_EVENTS, rec=True)

    # event handler
    eh = MyEventHandler()

    # notifier
    notifier = pyinotify.Notifier(wm, eh)
    notifier.loop()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

Results:

MODIFY event: /var/log/auth.log
MODIFY event: /var/log/syslog
MODIFY event: /var/log/syslog
MODIFY event: /var/log/auth.log
MODIFY event: /var/log/auth.log
MODIFY event: /var/log/syslog
MODIFY event: /var/log/auth.log
MODIFY event: /var/log/syslog
MODIFY event: /var/log/auth.log
OPEN event: /var/log/munin/munin-update.log
MODIFY event: /var/log/munin/munin-update.log
MODIFY event: /var/log/munin/munin-update.log
MODIFY event: /var/log/munin/munin-node.log
MODIFY event: /var/log/munin/munin-update.log
MODIFY event: /var/log/munin/munin-update.log
CLOSE_WRITE event: /var/log/munin/munin-update.log
OPEN event: /var/log/munin/munin-limits.log
MODIFY event: /var/log/munin/munin-limits.log
CLOSE_WRITE event: /var/log/munin/munin-limits.log
OPEN event: /var/log/munin/munin-graph.log
MODIFY event: /var/log/munin/munin-graph.log
CLOSE_WRITE event: /var/log/munin/munin-graph.log
OPEN event: /var/log/munin/munin-html.log
MODIFY event: /var/log/munin/munin-html.log
CLOSE_WRITE event: /var/log/munin/munin-html.log
MODIFY event: /var/log/auth.log
MODIFY event: /var/log/auth.log
MODIFY event: /var/log/syslog
MODIFY event: /var/log/auth.log
MODIFY event: /var/log/auth.log
MODIFY event: /var/log/syslog
MODIFY event: /var/log/auth.log
...

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os.path.relpath() source code for Python 2.5 — posted 2010-03-31
A hack to copy files between two remote hosts using Python — posted 2010-02-08
Iterating over lines in multiple Linux log files using Python — posted 2010-01-23

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