inotifywait -r doesn't react to files created in a new subdirectory

[Alex]

If I run:

$ inotifywait -r -e close_write --format '%w%f' /tmp/

and then do the following in /tmp:

$ mkdir test
$ touch test/test_subdir.txt
$ touch test_outer_dir.txt

then inotifywait will output:

/tmp/test_outer_dir.txt

i.e. it completely missed the first file, /tmp/test/test_subdir.txt.

If I add the -m flag to inotifywait:

$ inotifywait -r -m -e close_write --format '%w%f' /tmp/

then it works as expected... in the example above, the output would be:

/tmp/test/test_subdir.txt
/tmp/test_outer_dir.txt

I observe this behavior consistently with inotify-tools 3.13 in Precise and 3.14 in Trusty.

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Edit: I just found this related bug report from 6 years ago:

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=252888

Maybe it was never fully fixed?

[Eriberto (eriberto)]

Hi Alex,

I am the new maintainer of inotify-tools in Debian. I confirm this bug is also present in new upstream release 3.20.11.0. For sequential tests, is needed to reboot the system after each test. My tests were made in Debian Bullseye 11 (testing).

There is a new development place[1] for this project.

I think there is a link with bugs #17 and #25 in upstream tracker site[2]. However, I will open a new issue for this specific case.

[1] https://github.com/inotify-tools/inotify-tools
[2] https://github.com/inotify-tools/inotify-tools/issues

Regards,

Eriberto