[Sussex] tail -f fifo

John Crowhurst fyremoon at fyremoon.net
Fri Dec 12 19:42:02 UTC 2003


> Hi,
>
> This is weird, works on my FreeBSD box, but not on slackware-current...
> I think it's a problem with 'tail', because I have the same problem on
> earlier kernels than the 2.4.23 I'm using now, and filesystems other
> than reiserfs.
>
> $ mkfifo test
> $ tail -f test
>
> Meanwhile, in another console...
>
> $ echo one >test
> $ echo two >test
>
> The tail only shows "one", and nothing after that. So it seems to only
> pick up the first piece of input to a fifo, everything after that goes
> unnoticed.
>
> Hopefully I'm not missing something obvious here, because it certainly
> has me stumped. I can't see anything in the tail manpage which would
> suggest I'm doing anything wrong. Any ideas? :)
>
> btw, slackware-current (9.1 too I think) seems to use a pretty plain
> coreutils 5.0

Its the same with slackware 8.1 (2.4.18 kernel) with fileutils 4.0 &
textutils 2.0

Under RedHat 7.3, I get:
one
two
tail: test: file truncated
tail: test: cannot seek to offset 0: Illegal seek

That's with textutils 2.0.21 and fileutils 4.1

Now why does it work in RH, but not in Slackware? Perhaps Patrick
Volkerding would know?


-- 
John






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