.\" Copyright (C) 2005 Robert Love

.\" and Copyright (C) 2008, Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>

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.\" 2005-07-19 Robert Love <rlove@rlove.org> - initial version

.\" 2006-02-07 mtk, minor changes

.\" 2008-10-10 mtk: add description of inotify_init1()

.\"

.TH INOTIFY_INIT 2 2017-09-15 "Linux" "Linux Programmer's Manual"

.SH NAME

inotify_init, inotify_init1 \- initialize an inotify instance

.SH SYNOPSIS

.nf

.B #include <sys/inotify.h>

.PP

.B "int inotify_init(void);"

.BI "int inotify_init1(int " flags );

.fi

.SH DESCRIPTION

For an overview of the inotify API, see

.BR inotify (7).

.PP

.BR inotify_init ()

initializes a new inotify instance and returns a file descriptor associated

with a new inotify event queue.

.PP

If

.I flags

is 0, then

.BR inotify_init1 ()

is the same as

.BR inotify_init ().

The following values can be bitwise ORed in

.IR flags

to obtain different behavior:

.TP 12

.B IN_NONBLOCK

Set the

.BR O_NONBLOCK

file status flag on the new open file description.

Using this flag saves extra calls to

.BR fcntl (2)

to achieve the same result.

.TP

.B IN_CLOEXEC

Set the close-on-exec

.RB ( FD_CLOEXEC )

flag on the new file descriptor.

See the description of the

.B O_CLOEXEC

flag in

.BR open (2)

for reasons why this may be useful.

.SH RETURN VALUE

On success, these system calls return a new file descriptor.

On error, \-1 is returned, and

.I errno

is set to indicate the error.

.SH ERRORS

.TP

.B EINVAL

.RB ( inotify_init1 ())

An invalid value was specified in

.IR flags .

.TP

.B EMFILE

The user limit on the total number of inotify instances has been reached.

.TP

.B EMFILE

The per-process limit on the number of open file descriptors has been reached.

.TP

.B ENFILE

The system-wide limit on the total number of open files has been reached.

.TP

.B ENOMEM

Insufficient kernel memory is available.

.SH VERSIONS

.BR inotify_init ()

first appeared in Linux 2.6.13;

library support was added to glibc in version 2.4.

.BR inotify_init1 ()

was added in Linux 2.6.27;

library support was added to glibc in version 2.9.

.SH CONFORMING TO

These system calls are Linux-specific.

.SH SEE ALSO

.BR inotify_add_watch (2),

.BR inotify_rm_watch (2),

.BR inotify (7)

.SH COLOPHON

This page is part of release 4.15 of the Linux

.I man-pages

project.

A description of the project,

information about reporting bugs,

and the latest version of this page,

can be found at

\%https://www.kernel.org/doc/man\-pages/.