Matthew Woehlke <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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.
It's not orthogonal. The implementation of any new option like the one you've proposed must be robust, maintainable, and reasonably efficient. Portability to non-Linux would be nice, but isn't an immediate priority. Doing all of that is not possible with a conventional directory traversal. I suppose that's at least part of why inotify came about. > 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. I am very reluctant to add any enhancement to tail that makes it perform a directory traversal. IMHO, the proper solution is to use inotify in a new tool, or _maybe_ in tail. If the right people decide they want that functionality on non-Linux systems, maybe they'll write a gnulib module to provide some minimal approximation. _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils
