[Question] How to follow symbolic link

[fenghse]

I found that it does not follow the symbolic link, how to make it follow sym-link?

[DonyorM]

My guess is this occurs because the a symbolic link is considered a file, even if it points to a directory. You could solve this by iterating through your watched folders and adding new watches to each symbolic link pointing to a directory. If there's demand for this, I might be able to add an option to make symbolic links pointing to directories enabled through an optional parameter.

[Aluriak]

A simple solution is to apply os.path.realpath on all watched folders. So, we end up with something like:

observer.schedule(event_handler, os.path.realpath(path))

It could be by default in the library. Eventually with a verification that the simlink, if it is one, is not broken.

[petersilva]

You do not specify platform. I implemented a fix for Linux on my branch...
see if it helps: https://github.com/petersilva/watchdog

[aknrdureegaesr]

A regular directory I have here contains several symbolic links, each of which points to a file that lives elsewhere. When the content of any such file changes, I want to be alerted. That does not happen out of the box and I do not see how to make it happen via watchdog.

I'm under Linux. In a somewhat desperate attempt, I removed a symbolic link and replace it with a single-file-mount, something like touch file && sudo mount --bind ../otherdir/file file, as a workaround. But even that did not work.

[aknrdureegaesr]

I found that this works for my case:

from watchdog.observers.polling import PollingObserver as Observer

Not much later: A brief test suggests that this also works in the "symlink to directory" case.

[Corentin-pro]

I pushed a PR (#1086) that added follow_symlink for that matter. You have this keyword argument in the schedule function for the inotify observer, as polling is not affect.

You can use it like so (you probably want recursive too):

observer.schedule(event_handler, path, recursive=True, follow_symlink=True)

The PR was merged, I hope that will close that issue.