Re: gawk exit doesn't exit promptly

[Andrew J. Schorr]

On Fri, Jan 02, 2009 at 12:59:23PM -0500, Boemker, Tim wrote:
> $ cat a
> a
> $ tail -f a | gawk '{ print "exiting"; exit }'
> exiting

I tried on my machine, and gawk exits fine.  I think you
may be unhappy because the "tail -f" command does not
exit.  As a result, the command keeps waiting.  If you
go into another shell and run "echo b >> a", then you
will see that the entire pipeline will exit because
the "tail -f" command will get a SIGPIPE when it tries
to write to the nonexistent gawk process.

Regards,
Andy