Thanks for the response but I left out the -f ie. there is no documentation of how to exit tail -f I now know it's ctrl c Neil Pádraig Brady wrote:
Neil Adair wrote: Why isn't the command to exit tail in the man page? tail is not an interactive program and so will not parse commands you enter. It is known as a filter and just reads stdin and writes to stdout. So if you just type `tail`, it will block reading from stdin which will be connected to your terminal. You can indicate an end of file from the terminal with the Ctrl-d key combination. Now perhaps we could have logic in tail to do: if (isatty(stdin) && isatty(sterr)) { fprintf(stderr,"Hit Ctrl-d to end\n"); } Can anyone think of non human interactions between tail and terminals where the above wouldn't be appropriate? cheers, Pádraig. _______________________________________________ Bug-coreutils mailing list Bug-coreutils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-coreutils