filesystem triggers?

[Malcolm Herbert <mjch%mjch.net@localhost>]

A friend told me of a Linux kernel feature where the kernel will initiate
user-defined actions when nominated files in a monitored file system are
accessed which is apparently called inotify.

He's using this to trigger unit tests against all the code in their
project whenever any of the files in their development tree are modified.

This produces much more fine-grained testing than relying on running the
tests on each source-code checkin - the tests in this instance are small
and can be run in under a few minutes, as the code is python and doesn't
require a massive compilation effort each time around.

I'm interested in trying something similar for my own code development
but know nothing of such a feature with any of the usual filesystems that
we deal with in NetBSD - presumably this could be implemented with 
some fuse (is that correct?) based filesystem.  Has anyone seen anything
like this before who could give me some pointers on it?

Regards,
Malcolm

-- 
Malcolm Herbert                                This brain intentionally
mjch%mjch.net@localhost                                                left 
blank