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

Based on the excellent analysis of cincodenada, I made my own one-liner, which works better for me:

find /proc/*/fd/ -type l -lname "anon_inode:inotify" -printf "%hinfo/%f\n" | xargs grep -cE "^inotify" | column -t -s:

It helps to find all inotify watchers and their watching count. It does not translate process ids to their process names or sort them in any way but that was not the point for me. I simply wanted to find out which process consumes most of the watches. I then was able to search for that process using its process id.

You can omit the last column command if you don't have it installed. It's only there to make the output look nicer.

Okay, as you can see, there is a similar and less fork hungry approach from @oligofren. Better you use his simple script. It's very nice. I was also able to shrink my one-liner because I was not aware of the -lname parameter of find which comes in very handy here.