Full details are available at
http://bugs.debian.org/80541
In that thread, Christian Kurz also noted that FreeBSD's tail already
supports a -F option whose behaviour is almost identical to this proposed
option. The same is true in NetBSD.
--
Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 is out! ( http://www.debian.org/ )
Email: Herbert Xu ~{PmV>HI~} <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Home Page: http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/
PGP Key: http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/pubkey.txt
Package: textutils
Version: 2.0-3
Severity: wishlist
Hi,
after the discussion on debian-devel about the behaviour of tail to endlessly
tail a logfile, Ethan Benson told me about the options --follow=name and
--retry to get this behaviour. As I'm a bit lazy and don't want to type this
long options regulary, I created a patch for tail to support -F and
--follow-forever to generate this behaviour. You will find this patch at the
end of the mail. I hope that you include it in our tail and send it also to the
upstream maintainers. Thanks.
Christian
-- System Information
Debian Release: woody
Architecture: i386
Kernel: Linux seteuid 2.4.0-test9 #1 Sun Oct 29 18:10:04 CET 2000 i586
Versions of packages textutils depends on:
ii libc6 2.2-6 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an
-- Patch:
diff -uNr textutils-2.0.old/src/tail.c textutils-2.0/src/tail.c
--- textutils-2.0.old/src/tail.c Thu Aug 5 16:38:02 1999
+++ textutils-2.0/src/tail.c Tue Dec 26 17:33:25 2000
@@ -187,6 +187,7 @@
{"allow-missing", no_argument, NULL, CHAR_MAX + 1},
{"bytes", required_argument, NULL, 'c'},
{"follow", optional_argument, NULL, 'f'},
+ {"follow-forever", optional_argument, NULL, 'F'},
{"lines", required_argument, NULL, 'n'},
{"max-unchanged-stats", required_argument, NULL, CHAR_MAX + 2},
{"max-consecutive-size-changes", required_argument, NULL, CHAR_MAX + 3},
@@ -1311,7 +1312,7 @@
count_lines = 1;
forever = from_start = print_headers = 0;
- while ((c = getopt_long (argc, argv, "c:n:f::qs:v", long_options, NULL))
+ while ((c = getopt_long (argc, argv, "c:n:f:F::qs:v", long_options, NULL))
!= -1)
{
switch (c)
@@ -1357,6 +1358,11 @@
follow_mode = XARGMATCH ("--follow", optarg,
follow_mode_string, follow_mode_map);
break;
+
+ case 'F':
+ forever = 1;
+ follow_mode = Follow_name;
+ reopen_inaccessible_files =1;
case CHAR_MAX + 1:
reopen_inaccessible_files = 1;
