Re: tail --retry not re-attempting to open file

[Pádraig Brady]

On 04/17/2013 06:39 AM, Bernhard Voelker wrote:
> On 04/04/2013 03:42 AM, Pádraig Brady wrote:
>> I've nothing against simplicity though since the
>> inotify code already deals with missing files when
>> following by name, by watching the parent dir,
>> it might be easy to adjust to handle this case.
> 
> Hi Padraig,
> 
> sorry for the late reply.
> 
> Somehow, I don't have a good feeling for using inotify in the
> --follow=descriptor case because inotify works with file names.
> 
> Once tail opens the file successfully after inotify says it's
> there, tail would have to go back to polling, because all further
> inotify events are only relevant for the file name, not the
> descriptor.
>>From playing with the inotify code, I even had the impression that
> there are not all events delivered to tail reliably.  Is this true?

I've not noticed such issues TBH.
What kernel we you using for reference?

> Additionally to the above, I noticed that tail now would no longer
> exit in the case the file appears untailable, e.g. when it appears
> as directory.  I fixed this, too.

Excellent thanks.

You may want to consider using the existing retry_delay_()
rather than wait4lines() in the tests, but otherwise it
looks good to push.

thanks!
Pádraig.