trigger inotify event over NFS on Linux?

Question

Can I trigger a filesystem event on Linux, without an actual file change? Is there some system call that acts like the file was written? Is that even possible?

I have a NFS share mounted and want to get inotify events in the virtual machine, when a file changes on the server site.

It seems inotify doesn't work with NFS. Is there any network filesystem that supports inotify ?

It's easy to monitor the events on the server site, but how can I trigger the events on the client? At that moment I do a simple touch , but that's not ideal.

(the use case is for local development with docker (boot2docker, OS X.)

Answer 1

Sorry, it's just not a feature.

You could implement some sort of semaphore thing by using incrond to monitor the local filesystem, then do something (touch a file, trigger a script, etc.) on the remote machine to tell it there's been an update, but there's no native functionality in NFS.

Answer 2

Now I'm using Docker for Mac. I still use NFS because of the bad file sharing performence with osxfs. I have written a sublime text 3 plugin, to do the touch automatically, this solves my use case.

• sublime text 3 plugin: sublime_d4m
• nfs server in docker for mac: d4m-nfs