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HTML rendering created 2026-09-09 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | REMARKS | CAVEATS | CONFIGURATION | GIT | NOTES | COLOPHON |
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GIT-FSMONITOR--DAEMON(1) Git Manual GIT-FSMONITOR--DAEMON(1)
git-fsmonitor--daemon - A Built-in Filesystem Monitor
git fsmonitor--daemon start
git fsmonitor--daemon run
git fsmonitor--daemon stop
git fsmonitor--daemon status
A daemon to watch the working directory for file and directory
changes using platform-specific filesystem notification
facilities.
This daemon communicates directly with commands like git status
using the simple IPC[1] interface instead of the slower
githooks(5) interface.
This daemon is built into Git so that no third-party tools are
required.
start
Starts a daemon in the background.
run
Runs a daemon in the foreground.
stop
Stops the daemon running in the current working directory, if
present.
status
Exits with zero status if a daemon is watching the current
working directory.
This daemon is a long running process used to watch a single
working directory and maintain a list of the recently changed
files and directories. Performance of commands such as git status
can be increased if they just ask for a summary of changes to the
working directory and can avoid scanning the disk.
When core.fsmonitor is set to true (see git-config(1)) commands,
such as git status, will ask the daemon for changes and
automatically start it (if necessary).
For more information see the "File System Monitor" section in
git-update-index(1).
The fsmonitor daemon does not currently know about submodules and
does not know to filter out filesystem events that happen within a
submodule. If fsmonitor daemon is watching a super repo and a file
is modified within the working directory of a submodule, it will
report the change (as happening against the super repo). However,
the client will properly ignore these extra events, so performance
may be affected but it will not cause an incorrect result.
By default, the fsmonitor daemon refuses to work with
network-mounted repositories; this may be overridden by setting
fsmonitor.allowRemote to true. Note, however, that the fsmonitor
daemon is not guaranteed to work correctly with all
network-mounted repositories, so such use is considered
experimental.
On Mac OS and Linux, the inter-process communication (IPC) between
various Git commands and the fsmonitor daemon is done via a Unix
domain socket (UDS) — a special type of file — which is supported
by native Mac OS and Linux filesystems, but not on network-mounted
filesystems, NTFS, or FAT32. Other filesystems may or may not have
the needed support; the fsmonitor daemon is not guaranteed to work
with these filesystems and such use is considered experimental.
By default, the socket is created in the .git directory. However,
if the .git directory is on a network-mounted filesystem, it will
instead be created at $HOME/.git-fsmonitor-* unless $HOME itself
is on a network-mounted filesystem, in which case you must set the
configuration variable fsmonitor.socketDir to the path of a
directory on a native filesystem in which to create the socket
file.
If none of the above directories (.git, $HOME, or
fsmonitor.socketDir) is on a native filesystem the fsmonitor
daemon will report an error that will cause the daemon and the
currently running command to exit.
LINUX CAVEATS
On Linux, the fsmonitor daemon uses inotify to monitor filesystem
events. The inotify system has per-user limits on the number of
watches that can be created. The default limit is typically 8192
watches per user.
For large repositories with many directories, you may need to
increase this limit. Check the current limit with:
cat /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches
To temporarily increase the limit:
sudo sysctl fs.inotify.max_user_watches=65536
To make the change permanent, add to /etc/sysctl.conf:
fs.inotify.max_user_watches=65536
Everything below this line in this section is selectively included
from the git-config(1) documentation. The content is the same as
what’s found there:
fsmonitor.allowRemote
By default, the fsmonitor daemon refuses to work with
network-mounted repositories. Setting fsmonitor.allowRemote to
true overrides this behavior. Only respected when
core.fsmonitor is set to true.
fsmonitor.socketDir
This Mac OS and Linux-specific option, if set, specifies the
directory in which to create the Unix domain socket used for
communication between the fsmonitor daemon and various Git
commands. The directory must reside on a native filesystem.
Only respected when core.fsmonitor is set to true.
Part of the git(1) suite
1. simple IPC
file:///home/mtk/share/doc/git-doc/technical/api-simple-ipc.html
This page is part of the git (Git distributed version control
system) project. Information about the project can be found at
⟨http://git-scm.com/⟩. If you have a bug report for this manual
page, see ⟨http://git-scm.com/community⟩. This page was obtained
from the project's upstream Git repository
⟨https://github.com/git/git.git⟩ on 2026-08-04. (At that time,
the date of the most recent commit that was found in the
repository was 2026-08-03.) If you discover any rendering
problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there is
a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
(which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
man-pages@man7.org
Git 2.55.0.493.g5b2471 2026-08-03 GIT-FSMONITOR--DAEMON(1)
Pages that refer to this page: git-config(1), git-update-index(1)
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HTML rendering created 2026-09-09 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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