Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

@shionryuu
Forked from tbjgolden/inotify-instructions.md
Last active February 25, 2021 15:27
Show Gist options
  • Save shionryuu/73c3e05f697d8562c03a6899cfc5df70 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Save shionryuu/73c3e05f697d8562c03a6899cfc5df70 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
[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

Credits

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment