Which process was responsible for an event signalled by inotify?

Question

I am using pyinotify to detect access, changes, etc. on files in a given directory. Is there an easier way to find out which process was responsible for that - without having to patch inotify?

Answer 1

No, you can't, that information isn't in the struct inotify_event sent by the kernel.

Actually there isn't any guarantee that the process responsible is still running when you get the event.

Answer 2

Assuming you are on Linux (pyinotify would tend to indicate this) you could use SELinux (running in permissive mode of course) to wrap a process(es) and log all their file access/creation/deletion/etc.