fsnotify/fsnotify

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

10772 stars · 980 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

fsnotify is a Go library providing cross-platform filesystem notifications using native OS backends like inotify, kqueue, and ReadDirectoryChangesW. It lets Go programs watch files and directories and receive events for writes, creates, removes, and renames.

Use cases

• watch a directory for file changes in go
• trigger rebuilds when source files change
• monitor config files for modifications
• detect when files are created or deleted in a folder
• build a file sync tool that reacts to edits
• get notified when a log file is written to

When to choose

• you need file change notifications in a Go program across Linux, macOS, Windows, or BSD
• you want a mature, widely used library with native OS event backends rather than polling
• you need low-level file events to build your own watcher logic on top of

When to avoid

• you need polling-based watching for network mounts or unsupported platforms
• you need fanotify, FSEvents, or USN Journal features not yet supported
• you are not working in Go

Facets

library · maturity stable

file-system developer-tools developer-tools files cross-platform go windows bsd cross-platform filesystem-watcher inotify kqueue file-events notifications linux macos

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