Note: I have discontinued development of simple_notify, in favour of using the cross-platform watchdog library: https://github.com/gorakhargosh/watchdog

Example:

import simple_notify def on_change(event): print "event " + event.event + " occurred to " + event.path

watcher = simple_notify.watch("/tmp", callback=on_change) raw_input("press enter to quit...")

watch() spawns a new thread that will watch for inotify events and call your callback function.

Directories are tracked recursively, so when watching "/tmp" you would see everything that happens in /tmp and any of its subdirectories

Your callback receives as its single argument an Event instance. Event instances have the following fields:

• path: path to file (relative to the watched root)
• base: relative path to directory containing this node (from watch root)
• name: name of this node
• exists: (boolean) whether the file in this event now exists. False for REMOVED and MOVED_FROM events, True for ADDED, MODIFIED and MOVED_TO events
• is_dir: boolean

You can pass ignore_modifications=True to watch if you don't wish to be nodified of file modification events (merely additions, removals and moves).