[ Thanks to linuxaria for this link.
]
“inotify is a Linux kernel subsystem that acts to
extend filesystems to notice changes to the filesystem, and report
those changes to applications. It replaces an earlier facility,
dnotify, which had similar goals.“The original developers of inotify were John McCutchan, Robert
Love and Amy Griffis. It has been included in the mainline Linux
kernel from release 2.6.13 (June 18, 2005), and could be compiled
into 2.6.12 and possibly earlier releases by use of a patch.“One major use is in desktop search utilities like Beagle, where
its functionality permits reindexing of changed files without
scanning the filesystem for changes every few minutes, which would
be very inefficient. By being told that a file has changed directly
by the kernel, rather than actively looking, Beagle and such
utilities can achieve change-to-reindexing times of only about a
second.”