Date: Wed, 04 Aug 2010 11:18:02 -0700 From: Bakul Shah <bakul@bitblocks.com> To: Gabor Kovesdan <gabor@FreeBSD.org> Cc: poyopoyo@puripuri.plala.or.jp, current@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: bsdgrep does not work with tail -f | grep combination Message-ID: <20100804181802.579AF5B87@mail.bitblocks.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 03 Aug 2010 20:21:56 %2B0200." <4C585E44.5030608@FreeBSD.org> References: <86eiefhalp.wl%poyopoyo@puripuri.plala.or.jp> <4C585E44.5030608@FreeBSD.org>
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On Tue, 03 Aug 2010 20:21:56 +0200 Gabor Kovesdan <gabor@FreeBSD.org> wrote:
> Em 2010.08.03. 19:25, poyopoyo@puripuri.plala.or.jp escreveu:
> > Hi,
> >
> > It seems bsdgrep does not work when piped from tail -f.
> > I'm running r210728.
> >
> > term0$ jot 10> /tmp/1
> > term0$ tail -f /tmp/1 | grep 0
> > [no output]
> >
> > otherterm$ jot 10>> /tmp/1
> > [no output to term0]
> >
> > =====
> >
> > with GNU grep:
> >
> > term0$ tail -f /tmp/1 | gnugrep 0
> > 10
> > otherterm$ jot 10>> /tmp/1
> > [on term0]
> > 10
> > 10
> >
> I've checked on 8.0 and GNU grep doesn't output anything either for me.
> If you use tail -f, you will enter more lines and end it with EOF, won't
> you? And then BSD grep will process the input and print out matches. I
> don't think it's bad behaviour in itself but if you can explain why you
> think it's bad I'm willing to change it.
This is more fundamental, not just limited to grep. tail -f
never closes its stdout channel so the next process in the
pipeline will never seen an EOF on its stdin and must
continue processing its input. Try this:
rm -f /tmp/1; touch /tmp/1
tail -f /tmp/1 | cat &
while sleep 1; do date >> /tmp/1; done
Notice how cat doesn't quit. In fact
tail -f /tmp/1 | bsdgrep ''
must behave exactly the same as
tail -f /tmp/1 | cat
and so must this:
tail -f /tmp/1 | cat | bsdgrep ''
bsdgrep when used this way doesn't quit but doesn't do
anything either (including printing what tail -f spits out
from existing file data). This is just a bug.
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