The problems lie in the types used for some inotify interfaces, both at the kernel level and at the glibc level. This mail addresses the kernel problem. I will follow up with some suggestions for glibc changes.
For the sys_inotify_rm_watch() interface, the type of the 'wd' argument is
currently 'u32', it should be '__s32' . That is Robert's suggestion, and
is consistent with the other declarations of watch descriptors in the
kernel source, in particular, the inotify_event structure in
include/linux/inotify.h:
struct inotify_event {
__s32 wd; /* watch descriptor */
__u32 mask; /* watch mask */
__u32 cookie; /* cookie to synchronize two events */
__u32 len; /* length (including nulls) of name */
char name[0]; /* stub for possible name */
};
The patch makes the changes needed for inotify_rm_watch().
Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@googlemail.com> Cc: Robert Love <rlove@google.com> Cc: Vegard Nossum <vegard.nossum@gmail.com> Cc: Ulrich Drepper <drepper@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>