Bug 216729
Summary: | tail -Nf syntax doesn't work anymore with multiple files | ||
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Product: | Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 | Reporter: | William Yardley <william+redhat-bugzilla> |
Component: | coreutils | Assignee: | Tim Waugh <twaugh> |
Status: | CLOSED NOTABUG | QA Contact: | David Lawrence <dkl> |
Severity: | medium | Docs Contact: | |
Priority: | medium | ||
Version: | 5.0 | CC: | meyering |
Target Milestone: | --- | ||
Target Release: | --- | ||
Hardware: | All | ||
OS: | Linux | ||
Whiteboard: | |||
Fixed In Version: | Doc Type: | Bug Fix | |
Doc Text: | Story Points: | --- | |
Clone Of: | Environment: | ||
Last Closed: | 2006-11-22 10:38:16 UTC | Type: | --- |
Regression: | --- | Mount Type: | --- |
Documentation: | --- | CRM: | |
Verified Versions: | Category: | --- | |
oVirt Team: | --- | RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host: | |
Cloudforms Team: | --- | Target Upstream Version: | |
Embargoed: |
Description
William Yardley
2006-11-21 18:38:37 UTC
Thanks for the report. I can see how you'd think "tail -5f" should work for any number of arguments >= 1, but using a "-5" option (rather than "-n 5") puts your usage in GNU tail's "obsolete, maintain only bare minimum of support with legacy" mode. And legacy versions of tail-with-f only ever worked with a single file. (In reply to comment #1) > And legacy versions of tail-with-f only ever worked with a single > file. Well it's always worked w/ RHEL3, and seems to also work with RHEL4 (see below). That syntax also works fine on FreeBSD's "tail", and with the version of tail distributed with Debian 3.1 (5.2.1-31). It seems very inconsistent that it now works when there is one file as an argument, but not with multiple files. I already updated the thing I had which called tail this way, so it's not a big deal to me if you want to close this... it's just kind of irritating. triton:$ tail -5f /www/logs/error_log /www/logs/access_log.1164153600 ==> /www/logs/error_log <== [ 5 more lines ] ==> /www/logs/access_log.1164153600 <== [ 5 more lines ] triton:$ rpm -qf `which tail` coreutils-4.5.3-28.4 triton:$ cat /etc/redhat-release Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS release 3 (Taroon Update 8) nahant64:$ sudo tail -5f /var/log/messages /var/log/mysqld.log ==> /var/log/messages <== [ 5 lines ] ==> /var/log/mysqld.log <== nahant64:$ rpm -qf `which tail` coreutils-5.2.1-31.4 nahant64:$ cat /etc/redhat-release Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS release 4 (Nahant Update 4) 'tail -n5 -f' is what you want to use. The 'tail -5' syntax has been deprecated for quite a while. |