Paul Eggert wrote: > although doable it would be a bit of a pain to program
yup - sure would be a pain. If you're not sure whether your actual input of interest will end in a newline, can you add one, to "feed grep's newline hunger", thus for instance replacing your example: grep -q foo <(sh -c 'printf foo ; sleep 30' &) with: grep -q foo <(sh -c 'printf foo ; echo ; sleep 30' &) In any case, grep is quite line oriented, as implied by an early sentence in the man page grep(1): "PATTERNS is one or more patterns separated by newline characters," -- Paul Jackson jack...@fastmail.fm
