Re: [head] wished an option to continue consuming the input after the specified number of lines has been read

[Thibault LE PAUL]

Hello Bob. I wasn't clear enough. My goal was to do different things on the first lines and the last lines of same input, without using storage, thus using piped processes. Then I used tee, to fork the pipe into two processes. In my post before, I wanted to show three ways that work, including (head; cat) that does exactly the same as what would do head with the option I suggested in my initial post. Opposite to that, my original way that fails : rm /tmp/fifo1 mkfifo /tmp/fifo1 cat /tmp/fifo1|head -n2|sed 's/^/head &/' & tee /tmp/fifo1|tail -n2|sed 's/^/tail &/' That way, the /tmp/fifo1 fifo propagates SIGPIPE ahead to tee as soon as head has finished, then tee stops, and tail doesn't read the expected last lines, instead just the lines before tee aborts and EOF is read on pipe. The effect is observable on large input, like /usr/share/mysql/errmsg-utf8.txt Also tried tee -i to ignore interrupts, but it is not the purpose of this option I suppose. No effect in our case. Thibault Le Paul Directeur Technique tlep...@aebs-tech.com 10, Lotissement EL OMRANIA Dely Brahim. Alger. Algérie Tél: +213 (0) 21 91 74 11 Fax: +213 (0) 21 91 95 30 Mob: +213 (0) 555 052 487 Web: www.aebs-tech.com On 16/10/2012 04:20, Bob Proulx wrote: Hello Thibault, Please keep the mailing list in the CC list so that everyone can participate and learn from the discussion. Thanks. Thibault LE PAUL wrote: The problem was with a tee. Here is an example : rm /tmp/fifo1 mkfifo /tmp/fifo1 cat /tmp/fifo1|(head -20;cat >/dev/null)|sed 's/^/head &/' & #(cat /tmp/fifo1|sed -e '21,$d' -e 's/^/head &/') & #(cat /tmp/fifo1|awk 'FNR<21{print "head "$0}')& tee /tmp/fifo1|tail -20|sed 's/^/tail &/' It works with cat, I didn't think to it. You have shown part of what you are trying. That is good. But I don't see a problem with what you are showing. Please show us both what you are expecting and also what you are seeing that you think is a problem. Using 'head -20' is problematic usage. I recommend avoiding it. I tried this: $ mkfifo fifo $ cat fifo | head -n1 | sed 's/^/head &/' & [1] 20056 $ printf "foo\nfoo\nfoo\n" > fifo head foo $ [1]+ Done cat fifo | head -n1 | sed 's/^/head &/' $ That all seems reasonable to me. What problem are you seeing? Bob