Replying to my own message... I should have looked in the Unix FAQ first :) I believe the answer was in 3.14. It has to do with the amount of buffering. http://www.faqs.org/faqs/unix-faq/faq/part3/section-14.html
I did receive some off-list emails about this. One used strace to see that it was buffered. (Thank you.) Another simply said "man tail" -- well I already read the manpage and info page for it; I must have missed something; please share specific details. I guess as a workaround I could just use a single instance of awk, sed, grep, perl or a simple bash script to solve my problem. Or I could find and modify a BSD-licensed grep to not buffer the output. Does anyone know of a grep that can use multiple expressions that some are reversed, for example, one grep that can do the same as "grep keyword | grep -v exclude" (without knowing the placement of the keywords in the line)? Or can anyone share some examples of using awk to do this? Jeremy C. Reed
