inotifywait -r doesn't react to files created in a new subdirectory

If I run:

$ inotifywait -r -e close_write --format '%w%f' /tmp/

and then do the following in /tmp:

$ mkdir test
$ touch test/test_subdir.txt
$ touch test_outer_dir.txt

then inotifywait will output:

/tmp/test_outer_dir.txt

i.e. it completely missed the first file, /tmp/test/test_subdir.txt.

If I add the -m flag to inotifywait:

$ inotifywait -r -m -e close_write --format '%w%f' /tmp/

then it works as expected... in the example above, the output would be:

/tmp/test/test_subdir.txt
/tmp/test_outer_dir.txt

I observe this behavior consistently with inotify-tools 3.13 in Precise and 3.14 in Trusty.

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Edit: I just found this related bug report from 6 years ago:

http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=252888

Maybe it was never fully fixed?