Re: Piping tail -f to fold: tail -f log.txt | fold

[Bob Proulx]

Pádraig Brady wrote:
> Bob Proulx wrote:
> > In summary it is all about I/O buffering happening in libc's output
> > routines.  If the output is not a tty then data is buffered for
> > performance reasons into larger chunks before writing.
> 
> Well tail -f flushes stdout so it's not actually the problem in this case.

Oh!  Oops.  I had assumed it was tail -f.  But testing this now I see
that I was mistaken.  Sorry for the misinformation.  Thanks for the
correction!

Testing 'tail -f | fold -s' this on my Debian systems (Etch and Lenny)
does not show the buffering issue and works as desired by the original
poster.

Bob