persistent option ignored by fs.watch

[eladb]

fs.watch seem to be broken on mac.
This script (named j.js) does not exit.

var fs = require('fs');
fs.watch('j.js', { persistent: false }, function() {
    console.log('changed');
});

P.S. fs.watchFile is working.

[bnoordhuis]

Confirmed.

[bnoordhuis]

What is? {persistent:false} should work but doesn't.

[aslilac]

Sorry. I didn't notice the persistent false somehow.

[ghost]

I have this error as well on my Mac. It doesn't respond to a change.

[TrevorBurnham]

Could someone please change the issue title to something more specific, like "persistent option ignored by fs.watch under OS X"?

[bnoordhuis]

Updated. It's not specific to OS X, by the way.

[bnoordhuis]

This bug is a manifestation of a design flaw in the UNIX part of libuv. It's quite fixable, we just need to decide on the best approach.

The event loop maintains a reference count of active handles. Setting {persistent:false} makes Node drop the reference count by one but it turns out that some handle types - including uv_fs_event_t - are counted twice, hence the event loop remains alive.

[bnoordhuis]

Fixed in joyent/libuv@38fc6ad. The libuv that's bundled with node has been upgraded in 41f2725, a regression test has been added in 884f689.