GNU bug report logs - #24495
tail -F does not terminate when running out of names to watch

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Message #14 received at 24495 <at> debbugs.gnu.org (full text, mbox):

From: Pádraig Brady <P <at> draigBrady.com>
To: Bernhard Voelker <mail <at> bernhard-voelker.de>,
 Julian Büning <julian.buening <at> rwth-aachen.de>,
 24495 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Cc: Oscar Soria Dustmann <Oscar.SoriaDustmann <at> comsys.rwth-aachen.de>,
 Daniel Schemmel <daniel.schemmel <at> comsys.rwth-aachen.de>
Subject: Re: bug#24495: tail -F does not terminate when running out of names
 to watch
Date: Wed, 28 Sep 2016 14:27:42 +0100

[Message part 1 (text/plain, inline)]

On 27/09/16 21:16, Bernhard Voelker wrote:
> On 09/21/2016 08:15 PM, Pádraig Brady wrote:
>> We can get expected behavior option 1 with the attached patch.
>> Note that's inconsistent with current inotify behavior which does
>> _not_ actually give up on the name, as can be seen when starting
>> with a (non existent) file:
>>
>> $ touch foo
>> $ tail -F foo&
>> [1] 13624
>> $ rm foo; mkdir foo
>> tail: ‘foo’ has become inaccessible: No such file or directory
>> tail: ‘foo’ has been replaced with an untailable file; giving up on this name
>> $ rmdir foo; echo foo > foo
>> tail: ‘foo’ has become inaccessible: No such file or directory
>> tail: ‘foo’ has appeared;  following new file
>> foo
>>
>> The attached patch also removes the "; giving up on this name"
>> message in the inotify case as that's not the case.
>>
>> Ideally we'd have expected behavior option 2
>> both with and without inotify.
>> I'll need to look a bit more as to why we have that
>> limitation without inotify.
> 
> The new behavior is nice, but it would really be better to have
> consistent behavior in inotify and polling mode.

Yes consistency would be nice. Looking at the polling behavior I see it was
not fundamental to the initial implementation and only changed later:
http://git.sv.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=commitdiff;h=FILEUTILS-4_0q-68-g54d12f7

The attached patch how has the preferred behavior option 2
both with and without inotify.

thanks,
Pádraig

[tail-retry-exit.patch (text/x-patch, attachment)]

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