When incron is tasked to watch something, and the program part of the incrontab entry triggers the same event being watched, incron gets stuck in an endless loop. Example: /mydir IN_ATTRIB chmod g+w $@/$# Then create a file: touch /mydir/myfile And run chmod on it: chmod 640 /mydir/myfile Adding ",loopable=0" doesn't change this behavior. Incron should generally exclude events being triggered by its childs from being considered as trigger.