Re: GNU coding standards clash with POSIX for "... | tail -f"

[Paul Eggert]

address@hidden (Bob Proulx) writes:

> Could you expand on "... I don't think many people are relying on it,
> but it's common practice." as that seem to imply conflicting things

I meant both:

(1) "... | tail -f" commonly acts like "... | tail"; and

(2) I don't think many people are relying on this behavior.
    (Why would you want to run "tail -f" on a pipe?)

The FreeBSD implementation of 'tail' simply says "/* POSIX.2 requires
this. */" when it implements this behavior.  I expect other
implementations are similar.

Normally if there's something weird like this, it's because the
weirdness was in 7th Edition Unix.  But 7th Edition Unix didn't have
"tail -f".  So I'm not sure where this POSIX requirement came from.