Re: exiting tail

[Pádraig Brady]

Neil Adair wrote:
> Why isn't the command to exit tail in the man page?

tail is not an interactive program and
so will not parse commands you enter.
It is known as a filter and just reads stdin and
writes to stdout.

So if you just type `tail`, it will block
reading from stdin which will be connected
to your terminal. You can indicate an end of file
from the terminal with the Ctrl-d key combination.

Now perhaps we could have logic in tail to do:

if (isatty(stdin) && isatty(sterr)) {
    fprintf(stderr,"Hit Ctrl-d to end\n");
}

Can anyone think of non human interactions
between tail and terminals where the above
wouldn't be appropriate?

cheers,
Pádraig.