[Toybox] thoughts on `tail -F`?

enh enh at google.com
Tue Jun 22 17:33:10 PDT 2021


"how hard can `tail -F` be?" i thought ... but unless i'm using inotify
wrong, the answer turns out to be "quite a lot harder than i expected
because i need watch the parent directory for a different set of events,
and then filter those".

strace tells me that coreutils actually does use inotify, whereas busybox
just polls (by sleeping). would you be happy (at least for the time being)
with a crappy polling `tail -F`? i can guarantee i can find the time to do
that... rewriting the inotify stuff to support deletion/re-creation keeps
failing to fit into any available time gap (and then i have the "where was
i?" problem that i know you're all too familiar with!).
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/attachments/20210622/1e1da115/attachment.html>


More information about the Toybox mailing list