textutils-2.0 tail -f bug (Solaris & AIX)

[Matthew Braun]

Textutils folks,

I've been using GNU tail 2.0 for at least a year to tail a log file and
for some reason, I just noticed this bug.  When you run tail -f file and
pipe it through grep, nothing shows up until more stuff is appended to
the file.  If you do 'tail -1000f {file} | grep .' on a big file, you'll
get some output, but not the stuff near the end of the file.

I've reproduced this bug on Solaris 2.6, 7, 8 and AIX 4.3.3, it works
fine on Linux (kernel 2.2.14 on SuSE 6.4 and kernel 2.4.4-4GB on SuSE
7.2) though.

Your thoughts?

Thanks,

Matthew.

=====

sa:~> tail --version
tail (GNU textutils) 2.0
Written by Paul Rubin, David MacKenzie, Ian Lance Taylor, and Jim Meyering.

Copyright (C) 1999 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
sa:~> tail -f /tmp/twenty.line.file | grep .
^C
sa:~> /ans/build/textutils-1.22/src/tail -f /tmp/twenty.line.file | grep .
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
^C
sa:~> /ans/build/textutils-1.22/src/tail --version
tail (GNU textutils) 1.22