Can't figure out how inotifywait excluding works, can somebody explain?

Question

I have the following peace of code in bash

inotifywait -r -m -e modify -e moved_to -e moved_from -e move -e move_self -e create -e delete -e delete_self $list_of_folders |
    while read path action file; do
        message=$myip%0A$action%0A$path$file
        message
    done

I don't know how can I exclude from watch files named "logs.txt" and ".git" folders, can anyone explain how excluding works in inotifywait?

p.s. logs.txt and .git folders, may be in any location, I don't know exactly where

`inotifywait` has an `--exclude` option. Does it do what you want? — John1024, Aug 07 '20 at 16:07

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 07 '20 at 20:44

Based on John1024's comment, I believe you need to use --exclude 'logs\.txt|\.git' in your inotifywait command like this:

inotifywait --exclude 'logs\.txt|\.git' -r -m -e modify -e moved_to -e moved_from -e move -e move_self -e create -e delete -e delete_self $list_of_folders | # ...

This option takes a regular expression that is used to ignore events whose filename matches it. In this case, the regular expression logs\.txt|\.git means any filename equal to logs.txt or (|) .git. The backslashes are required to escape the dots because they have a special meaning inside regular expressions.

This exclusion seems to work well for any location of the logs.txt file or .git directory. And it even excludes events from descendants of the .git directory.

Thanks, this is exactly what i looking for. – Petr Aug 08 '20 at 08:56 — Petr, Aug 08 '20 at 08:56

Can't figure out how inotifywait excluding works, can somebody explain?

1 Answers1