Re: tail --recursive

[Simon Windows]

Jim Meyering wrote:
> Thanks for the contribution.
> 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.
>
> There are already a couple of inotify(7)-based versions
> of tail.  I see one that's called inotail.

I hadn't considered inotify, to be honest I wasn't aware of it.

> One of the most important parts of a new-feature suggestion
> is the justification for it.  Why is your feature needed?
> And can it be made robust?  I.e., what if there are more files
> in the hierarchy than the maximum number of open file descriptors?

I wanted it to monitor the output of a folder of log files and tail -f
<dir>/* would not give me new files. A good example would be monitoring
/var/log on a system that uses logrotate. tail -rf /var/log would
satisfy this.

I haven't put any additional features in to make it robust aside from
checking return values to prevent a segfault. What would you suggest?


Simon