Re: Bug#545422: coreutils: "tail -f -" fails

[Giuseppe Scrivano]

Jim Meyering <address@hidden> writes:

> Considering the amount of complexity it adds to already-dense code
> (in spite of the fact that some is just due to indentation changes),
> for so little gain (who will use tail -f on stdin and care whether tail
> is sleep-based or inotify-based?), I'm reluctant to use it at all.
>
> Is there a good reason to want to avoid the sleep-based code
> in this corner case?

In my opinion, it is desiderable that tail works approximately in the
same way when stdin is specified, as we are already doing with --pid.
If we decide to handle this too, there will not be any known case that
the inotify back-end doesn't support.


> Summarizing what this patch does: it changes e.g., tail -f - F1 F2 F3
> not to revert to the sleep-based implementation solely due
> to the presence of an unnamed (stdin) file, "-".
> Instead, the files F1, F2, F3 would still be tracked efficiently via
> inotify, and stdin would be tracked via a select-based wait.

Exactly.


Giuseppe