From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: util-linux-owner@vger.kernel.org Received: from mout.gmx.net ([212.227.17.22]:52631 "EHLO mout.gmx.net" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751247AbbCMJAc (ORCPT ); Fri, 13 Mar 2015 05:00:32 -0400 Received: from brln-5f72d2af.pool.mediaways.net ([95.114.210.175]) by mail.gmx.com (mrgmx103) with ESMTPSA (Nemesis) id 0MTjMy-1YwmI21mi0-00QX3m for ; Fri, 13 Mar 2015 10:00:30 +0100 From: Ruediger Meier To: util-linux@vger.kernel.org Subject: tailf, really needed? Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2015 10:00:29 +0100 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Message-Id: <201503131000.29307.sweet_f_a@gmx.de> Sender: util-linux-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: Hi, As far as I understood tailf's advantage over "tail -f" is that it does not access the file when it does not grow. But nowadays coreutils "tail -f" also does not seem to access the file. So do we really need tailf? The point is that I've noticed that our tailf fails to deal with filesystems where inotify is broken. For example it does not work for overlayfs. coreutils tail code looks quite complicated and seems to manage such cases. Is it worth to fix our tailf or better just remove it and use "tail -f"? BTW coreutils tail is much more comfortable. It has many important options. For example watching log files without -F or --retry does not make sense to me (because of logrotate). Last but not least, is anybody using tailf at all? Google does not find much about people who are using this. cu, Rudi