Subject: bug#9102: "timeout 0 FOO" should timeout right away

From: Pádraig Brady <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2011 23:17:59 +0100

On 19/07/11 23:00, James Youngman wrote:
> 2011/7/17 Paul Eggert <[email-masked]>:
>> On 07/17/11 05:31, Pádraig Brady wrote:
>>> Well my reasoning for having "0" mean don't timeout,
>>> was to have an easy way in scripts to specify no timeout
>>
>> That's a good thing to have, but it could be specified in
>> a different way.  One possibility is the '1' (digit 1) option,
>> e.g.,  "timeout -1 FOO".  Or if that's too clever, we could
>> use some other letter for the option.
> 
> I'm not sure that's worked out so well for tail.   But if we are
> looking for an argument indicating we don't want a timeout, the
> argument "never" is quite clear.

I don't follow (pardon the pun).
This will "sleep(0)" between polls which takes 10% of my cpu here:

  tail ---disable -s0 -F nosuch

cheers,
Pádraig.