Queuing events with inotifywait

Question

Initialize source and destination directories.

srcdir=/user/user1/src
tagtdir=/user/user1/dest

I would like to get notified when a file is copied over into the srcdir and -m for continuous monitoring.

inotifywait -m -r -e close "$srcdir" | 

while read filename eventlist eventfile 

Invoke my python script.

do 
    mv "$srcdir/$eventfile" "$tgtdir/$eventfile" && ./myscript.py "$eventfile" 
done 

Unfortunately, my script that quite some time and if there are other files being copied over while myscript.py is being executed, I miss those events. Is it possible to queue up the events and process them later?

Another option is I will run myscript.py in background and that might solve this issue.

Answer 1

You can use Watchman instead; it runs as a persistent service and will remember the events that you missed.

There are a number of different ways that you might achieve your use-case, but probably the easiest is to set up a trigger and have watchman directly run your script as files change, or use the pywatchman client bindings to have a persistent python script run and subscribe to the events and take whatever action you'd like.