The fanotify API - corrections [LWN.net]

The fanotify API - corrections

Posted Jul 14, 2009 22:30 UTC (Tue) by icculus (guest, #4942)
In reply to: The fanotify API - corrections by efexis
Parent article: The fanotify API

"...ignore any notifications where the pathname doesn't begin with your
required string (eg, '/home/')"

I don't see a way to get an actual path from this API, just the file
handle.

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The fanotify API - corrections

Posted Jul 18, 2009 7:22 UTC (Sat) by efexis (guest, #26355) [Link]

Oh yeah it certainly does look like that... it can't possibly be true though, after all, how would a virus scanner warn of which file is infected without path information? How would it move or delete the file without knowing what directory it's in? It would also make it useless for an indexing system, as the indexing system is surely a file contents/metadata <--> file path lookup, so without the path, it's useless. You couldn't tie it to git or anything to monitor for code changes because you wouldn't know what file's being changed.

Is there no file descriptor path lookup method? Would it not appear in /proc/self/fd/? There's gotta be a way otherwise surely this patch would just be laughed out.