Re: tail --recursive

[Matthew Woehlke]

Simon Windows wrote:
> Jim Meyering wrote:
> > I haven't looked at it at all yet,
> > but wonder if you've considered using inotify?
> > That seems like that mechanism would be much more appropriate,
> > when tailing many files in an arbitrary hierarchy.
>
> I have looked at the inotify library as you suggested. I agree it would
> be a useful tool to use in tail as it removes the need to poll files and
> would make a recursive version much more efficient. I can also see there
> has been some discussion of using inotify in coreutils for this purpose.
>
> I think that issue is orthogonal to the recursive option I am proposing.

To point out the obvious... 'tail' works on most POSIX systems (and 
perhaps some that aren't). inotify works on... Linux. So an enhancement 
to tail might benefit users of AIX, Irix, OSF, etc. that don't have 
inotify, whereas iwatch is useless on such systems.

--
Matthew
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