I wholeheartedly agree with this blog post. I believe someone on here yesterday was asking about config file locations and setting them manually. This is in the same vein. I can't tell you how many times a command line method for discovering the location of a config file would have saved me 30 minutes of googling.
You can call it recursively on .config (for instance), and watch for specific events (creation, deletion, modification, etc).
But I expect this to be expensive on really large folders and I'd avoid it if I could.
Btw it's syscalls iirc (inotify-tools just exposes them)