Version 5.00 (http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/inotify.7.html) >If no events have so far occurred, then, assuming a blocking file descriptor, read(2) will block until at least one event occurs (unless interrupted by a signal, in which case the call fails with the error EINTR; see signal(7)). but https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=195711 says that since 3.8 the call is restarted, which is also my experience (and huge annoyance). However, I am not on the latest Kernel but 4.9.0-8-amd64 so I dont know if it has been changed back. A cursory search over the kernel code says that last change with inotify and EINTR in same context was removing EINTR and replacing with ERESTARTSYS (https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/1ca39ab9d21ac93f94b9e3eb364ea9a5cf2aba06). There really should be caveat that the syscall is probably restarted when reading from an inotify file-descriptor. This has important implications on how one can use the interface (ie simple blocking style is absolutely not enough and some multiplexing is always required for reliable execution even in simple programs). Emil Fihlman
