Fanotify Library

Note

This is a modified version of the original fanotify. This version is meant to provide stability to programs who need to monitor a massive amount of file changes. I will attempt to maintain it to the best of my ability.

Fanotify library provides a simple API to monitor filesystem for events.

The listener is initialized with flags automatically based on the kernel version. The mark flag features that specify the the events to monitor a file/directory are validated and checked for valid combinations and validated against the kernel version.

fanotify has features spanning different kernel versions -

• For Linux kernel version 5.0 and earlier no additional information about the underlying filesystem object is available.
• For Linux kernel versions 5.1 - 5.8 additional information about the underlying filesystem object is correlated to an event.
• For Linux kernel version 5.9 or later the modified file name is made available in the event.

Examples

Example code for different use-cases can be found here https://github.com/opcoder0/fanotify-examples

Known Issues

Certain flag combinations / event types cause issues with event reporting.

• fanotify.FileCreated cannot be or-ed / combined with fanotify.FileClosed. The fanotify event notification group does not generate any event for this combination.
• Using fanotify.FileOpened with any of the event types containing OrDirectory causes numerous duplicate events for the path.
• fanotifyFileOrDirectoryOpened with any of the other event types causes numerous duplicate events for the path.

Tests

Running tests require CAP_SYS_ADM privilege. To run the tests make sure to add go to the sudo PATH.

The command runs all the tests except the ones that test the flag bugs mentioned in the "Known Issues" section above -

sudo go test -v

To run the tests with flag issues -

sudo go test -v -bug