Using incrontab mv file results in 0 byte file

Question

I'm watching a folder using incrontab with the command in the incrontab -e editor:

/media/pi/VDRIVE IN_CLOSE_WRITE sudo mv $@/$# /media/pi/VDRIVE/ready/$#

The watched folder is relieving a file over the network from another machine—the file shows up OK and appears to trigger the incrontab job presumably once the copy process has closed the file, but the mv command results in a 0 bytes file in the destination folder with the correct name.

All run as root.

It defines the watched folder which is /media/pi/VDRIVE the IN_CLOSE_WRITE checks for when the file is closed after being copied, as far as I understand it — Nowski, Feb 06 '19 at 14:02
your code looks like part of a bash script. It is not descriptive. we cannot help you in this way — Derviş Kayımbaşıoğlu, Feb 06 '19 at 14:08
I have just put the command directly in the incrontab interface (though I have tried it via a script also) access via sudo incrontab -e — Nowski, Feb 06 '19 at 14:14

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 24 '19 at 08:53

It seems that there is a bug in Samba on OSX which results in two events when writing to a shared folder on the network. This makes incrontab pretty unworkable when working with OSX computers (more recent OS 10.7 up). So when OSX writes a file to the Linux samba share, there are two events, the first one triggers the mv action before the file has finished actually writing. Its a bug in OSXs SAMBA implementation.

In the end I used inotify to write events to a log file (of which there are always two), then scanned the file for two instances of the event before performing the action.

Another strategy was to use LSOF on a cron routine that will just ignore any files open for writing.

Using incrontab mv file results in 0 byte file

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