How do I find out what inotify watches have been registered?

Question

I have my inotify watch limit set to 1024 (I think the default is 128?). Despite that, yeoman, Guard and Dropbox constantly fail, and tell me to up my inotify limit. Before do

Answer 1

Since this is high in Google results, I'm copy-pasting part of my answer from a similar question over on the Unix/Linux StackExchange:

I ran into this problem, and none of these answers give you the answer of "how many watches is each process currently using?" The one-liners all give you how many instances are open, which is only part of the story, and the trace stuff is only useful to see new watches being opened.

This will get you a file with a list of open inotify instances and the number of watches they have, along with the pids and binaries that spawned them, sorted in descending order by watch count:

sudo lsof | awk '/anon_inode/ { gsub(/[urw]$/,"",$4); print "/proc/"$2"/fdinfo/"$4; }' | while read fdi; do count=$(sudo grep -c inotify $fdi); exe=$(sudo readlink $(dirname $(dirname $fdi))/exe); echo -e $count"\t"$fdi"\t"$exe; done | sort -nr > watches

If you're interested in what that big ball of mess does and why, I explained in depth over on the original answer.