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Forked from tbjgolden/inotify-instructions.md
Created January 3, 2021 20:37
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[Arch Linux] [Manjaro] How to avoid "Visual Studio Code is unable to watch for file changes in this large workspace" (error ENOSPC)

To avoid this error, we need to increase the inotify watcher limit.

The way to do this is different on Arch based distributions than other Linux distributions.

Instructions for Arch Linux/Manjaro

Check for an already existing inotify config file (recent versions of Manjaro include one)

ls /etc/sysctl.d/*-max_user_watches.conf

a) If no output

echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288 | sudo tee /etc/sysctl.d/40-max-user-watches.conf && sudo sysctl --system

b) If the command outputs a file

(in the rare case where it outputs multiple files, continue using the last one in the list)

# replace `/etc/sysctl.d/50-max-user-watches.conf` with the file returned from the previous `ls` command
echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288 | sudo tee /etc/sysctl.d/50-max-user-watches.conf && sudo sysctl --system

Check it's working

cat /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches

Expected output: 524288

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