INotifyWatcher::watch returns an error if any subdirectories contain a broken link.

[maurizi]

This came up on my project: maurizi/retag.rs#23

From what I can tell, because follow_links(true) is called here, WalkDir returns the target path of symlinks, even if they are broken links. Then when we pass the path over to inotify, it correctly returns an error.

@passcod I can think of a couple of ways to fix this.

• Each item returned by WalkDir could be tested to see that it exists before calling add_watch
• Ignore some errors (IO errors like file does not exist) returned by add_watch when calling it from add_watch_recursively
• Ignore all errors returned by add_watch when calling it from add_watch_recursively

What do you think?

[passcod]

Ah, I'd have thought the immediate next part in the code (that ignores errors in the lookup) would have solved this. I think the simple thing would just be to completely ignore broken symlinks, at the WalkDir level at least.

I'm idly wondering how this all behaves on other platforms that have symlinks (OS X)... does FSEvent just ignore broken symlinks itself? Hmm.

[maurizi]

Maybe the best way to fix this is to remove the call to follow_symlinks and then call WalkDir again for every symlink found, if it is a valid symlink.

That would also allow rsnotify to watch for changes to the symlink itself, which would be a nice bonus.

[maurizi]

@passcod if you have a preference for how to fix this, I'd be happy to work on a PR.

[passcod]

Yep, your last proposition sounds good. If you want to work on it, even more awesome :)

[maurizi]

So..... I think I had this all wrong. The way that DirEntry::path() works, it always returns the symlink's path, not it's target (as is noted in the documentation for WalkDir http://burntsushi.net/rustdoc/walkdir/struct.DirEntry.html#method.path).

So actually everything is working? I think perhaps the original issue reported on my project may have been for a different OS than linux...

Anyways, sorry for the non-bug.

[passcod]

No problem, thanks for investigating!