Re: tail broken (?!) and devices not activating
On 2009-09-22 04:17 +0200, Celejar wrote:
> I'm seeing some really weird problems on my system. I don't know if
> they're at all related, but I'll report them both in the same email, in
> case they are.
>
> 1) tail -f stops working - I see the tail of the file, but it fails to
> refresh when content is added to the file. What on earth could be
> causing this? This is tail from coreutils - nothing fancy, no inotify
> dependency, just simple polling of the file!
In coreutils 7.5 tail has gone fancy and uses inotify if possible, see
the NEWS file. It works for me, but there are some bugs that have been
fixed in 7.6 (which is not packaged for Debian yet) that may affect you.
Citing the coreutils 7.6 NEWS file:
tail -f (inotify-enabled) now flushes any initial output before blocking.
Before, this would print nothing and wait: stdbuf -o 4K tail -f /etc/passwd
Note that this bug affects tail -f only when its standard output is buffered,
which is relatively unusual.
[bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
tail -f once again works with standard input. inotify-enabled tail -f
would fail when operating on a nameless stdin. I.e., tail -f < /etc/passwd
would say "tail: cannot watch `-': No such file or directory", yet the
relatively baroque tail -f /dev/stdin < /etc/passwd would work. Now, the
offending usage causes tail to revert to its conventional sleep-based
(i.e., not inotify-based) implementation.
[bug introduced in coreutils-7.5]
Sven
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