# git-fsmonitor—​daemon(1) Manual Page

## NAME

git-fsmonitor--daemon - (EXPERIMENTAL) A Built-in File System Monitor

## SYNOPSIS

    git fsmonitor—​daemon start
    git fsmonitor—​daemon run
    git fsmonitor—​daemon stop
    git fsmonitor—​daemon status

## DESCRIPTION

NOTE! This command is still only an experiment, subject to change dramatically (or even to be abandoned).

A daemon to watch the working directory for file and directory changes using platform-specific file system notification facilities.

This daemon communicates directly with commands like `git status` using the simple IPC interface instead of the slower githooks(5) interface.

This daemon is built into Git so that no third-party tools are required.

## OPTIONS

start

  Starts a daemon in the background.

run

  Runs a daemon in the foreground.

stop

  Stops the daemon running in the current working directory, if present.

status

  Exits with zero status if a daemon is watching the current working directory.

## REMARKS

This daemon is a long running process used to watch a single working directory and maintain a list of the recently changed files and directories. Performance of commands such as `git status` can be increased if they just ask for a summary of changes to the working directory and can avoid scanning the disk.

When `core.useBuiltinFSMonitor` is set to `true` (see git-config(1)) commands, such as `git status`, will ask the daemon for changes and automatically start it (if necessary).

For more information see the "File System Monitor" section in git-update-index(1).

## CAVEATS

The fsmonitor daemon does not currently know about submodules and does not know to filter out file system events that happen within a submodule. If fsmonitor daemon is watching a super repo and a file is modified within the working directory of a submodule, it will report the change (as happening against the super repo). However, the client will properly ignore these extra events, so performance may be affected but it will not cause an incorrect result.

## GIT

Part of the git(1) suite