inotify-win

A port of the inotifywait tool for Windows, see https://github.com/rvoicilas/inotify-tools

Downloads

There are two ways to download the current release binary:

• From the releases page: https://github.com/thekid/inotify-win/releases
• Via the community-contributed WinGet package: https://github.com/PolarGoose/inotifywait-for-Windows

Usage

The command line arguments are similar to the original one's:

$ inotifywait.exe
Usage: inotifywait [options] path [...]

Options:
-h/--help:       Shows this usage
-v/--version:    Shows version number
-r/--recursive:  Recursively watch all files and subdirectories inside path
-m/--monitor:    Keep running until killed (e.g. via Ctrl+C)
-q/--quiet:      Do not output information about actions
-e/--event list: Which events (create, modify, delete, move) to watch, comma-separated. Default: all
--format format: Format string for output.
--exclude:       Do not process any events whose filename matches the specified regex
--excludei:      Ditto, case-insensitive
--include:       Only process events whose filename matches the specified regex
--includei:      Ditto, case-insensitive

Formats:
%e             : Event name
%f             : File name
%w             : Path name
%T             : Current date and time
%%             : Percent sign

Contributing

Pull requests welcome ☺️

Compiling

If you have Cygwin installed, just run sh build.sh in this directory. This will create the executable, inotifywait.exe.

Manual complilation goes as follows:

$ %WINDIR%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\csc.exe /o /t:exe /out:inotifywait.exe src\*.cs

Known issues

When moving files, not all events are reported consistently with the original. See issue #7 for an explanation.