incrontab(1)

💖 incrontab — the table manipulator for inotify cron (incron) 💖

okay bestie, welcome to incrontab(1), aka the incron documentation's most iconic little tool 🎀 this page lives in section 1 of the manual and it's about to make your whole cron-adjacent life make sense, no cap.

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

incrontab [-u user] [-f config] file

incrontab [-u user] [-f config] [-l | -r | -e | -t | -d]

two forms, one queen 👑 that's literally it.

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

so incrontab is a table manipulator for the inotify cron (incron) system, fr fr. it creates, removes, modifies and lists user tables — those are the incrontab(5) ones in case you were wondering 🦋

every single user gets an incron table. and when we say every user we mean every user — even system users that don't even have home directories, they get one too 💅 the catch? you can't manipulate these tables directly. only root can effectively change them, and honestly? it is NOT recommended to do so. like, at all. don't do it. 🙈

also important: all informational messages from this program get printed to the standard error output (stderr). not stdout, bestie, stderr. write that down 📝

🔐 who's even allowed to use incron

here's the vibe check on permissions:

• if /etc/incron.allow exists → only the users listed in it may use incron ✨
• otherwise, if /etc/incron.deny exists → only the users NOT listed in it may use incron 💫
• if neither of these files exists → literally everyone is allowed to use incron 😭

⚠️ Important note: this behavior is insecure and will probably be changed to be compatible with the style used by ISC Cron. so enjoy it while it lasts, i guess 💀

the location of these files can be changed in the configuration, so you're not stuck with the defaults 🎀

📥 the import form

the first form of this command imports a file, validates it, and stores it to the table. and guess what — you can use - to load from the standard input instead. iconic behavior honestly 🫶

🚩 the options, one by one

• -u (or --user) — overrides the current (real) user to the given one. this is meant for manipulating system users' tables (think apache, postfix, daemon, etc. — the whole squad). it can only be used if the current user has root's effective rights 👑
• -l (or --list) — prints the current table to the standard output. simple, clean, we love her 💖
• -r (or --remove) — permanently removes the current table (if there even is one) with no warning and no confirmation. gone. deleted. bye. use with caution!! 😭🔥
• -e (or --edit) — fires up an editor so you can edit the user table (editor selection info is below, keep scrolling bestie). you can edit your incron table right now. if the table ends up changed, it stores the modified version 💅
• -t (or --types) — prints the list of supported event types, delimited by commas, to the standard output. this one's for front-end applications trying to find out which event types were compiled in 🔍
• -d (or --reload) — causes the current table to be reloaded by incrond(8). it does this by "touching" the table (writing into it without actually modifying it). this is for stuff like creating watches on newly created files (with already existing rules) or for rearming IN_ONESHOT watches ✨
• -f <FILE> (or --config=<FILE>) — specifies another location for the configuration file. /etc/incron.conf is used by default. heads up though: this feature requires root privileges 👑

🧚 how the editor gets picked

there's a whole complex algorithm for determining which editor you'll be editing with, and it's giving ✨layers✨. if any of the following rules succeeds, that appropriate editor gets used:

1. EDITOR environment variable
2. VISUAL environment variable
3. configuration value
4. etc/alternatives/editor
5. hard-wired editor (vim by default)

🌈 and a gentle PSA: it's not recommended to use graphical editors (such as gVim, KEdit, etc.) because of possible problems with connecting to the X server. save yourself the heartbreak 💔

👀 SEE ALSO 👀

incrond(8), incrontab(5), incron.conf(5)

go read them, they're the rest of the lore 📚

🫶 AUTHOR 🫶

• Andreas Altair Redmer <altair.ibn.la.ahad.sy@gmail.com> — please report bugs to https://github.com/ar-/incron/issues 🐛
• Lukas Jelinek <lukas@aiken.cz>

📜 COPYING 📜

this program is free software. it can be used, redistributed and/or modified under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2. periodt. 💜

okay that's the whole page bestie, and as a lil sign-off: this doc is by Lukas Jelinek, it's version 0.5.12, and it belongs to the incrontab(1) manual 🎀 now go touch some tables (with -d, not literally) 🌸✨