Not the original poster, but Windows allows you to get all changes in an NTFS volume, effectively allowing you to monitor notifications to an unlimited amount o

Not the original poster, but Windows allows you to get all changes in an NTFS volume, effectively allowing you to monitor notifications to an unlimited amount of files and directories (didn't remember what the feature was called, a quick googling led me to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/change-journals https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/change... ). This allows software like Voidtool's Everything to index the entire filesystem and update that index in real time. Using inotify for that is not possible since you'd have to recursively register for hunderds of thousands of directories, which far exceeds the limit of allowed registerations (and either way, would be quite wasteful to hold 100,000 registration handles). As a result, the Linux equivalent to Everything is unable to find recently created files, erronously finds deleted files and has outdated metadata fo recently changed files. Alternatively, you can attempt to reindex right before searching (e.g. rerun updatedb if you are using locate), but then your searches are much slower and the benefit of indexing for a quick search is reduced significantly. A nicer API would allow to use one registration handle to get notifications for an entire directory tree or at least have a seprate API for an entire filesystem (like the NTFS option mentioned above). At least, that was the conclusion I came to when I last researched the topic. If you know of a supported way of doing this on Linux I'd really love to know! It will allow me to finally make the program I wanted to make!