The problems lie in the types used for some inotify interfaces, both at the kernel level and at the glibc level. This mail addresses the kernel problem. I will follow up with some suggestions for glibc changes.

For the sys_inotify_rm_watch() interface, the type of the 'wd' argument is
currently 'u32', it should be '__s32' .  That is Robert's suggestion, and
is consistent with the other declarations of watch descriptors in the
kernel source, in particular, the inotify_event structure in
include/linux/inotify.h:

struct inotify_event {
        __s32           wd;             /* watch descriptor */
        __u32           mask;           /* watch mask */
        __u32           cookie;         /* cookie to synchronize two events */
        __u32           len;            /* length (including nulls) of name */
        char            name[0];        /* stub for possible name */
};

The patch makes the changes needed for inotify_rm_watch().

Signed-off-by: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@googlemail.com>
Cc: Robert Love <rlove@google.com>
Cc: Vegard Nossum <vegard.nossum@gmail.com>
Cc: Ulrich Drepper <drepper@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Al Viro <viro@zeniv.linux.org.uk>