Re: [RFC] have tail always detect broken pipes

[Bernhard Voelker]

On 06/07/2017 10:00 AM, Pádraig Brady wrote:
> The following will hang indefinitely, due to no further data
> being written through the pipe, and thus no SIGPIPE generated:
> 
>   $ tail -f /etc/hosts | sleep 1
> 
> A more practical use case might be:
> 
>   tail -f file.log | grep -q trigger &&
>   process_immediately
> 
> Another case where one might notice this is that sometimes
> (depending on how slow the reader is) the following will hang,
> and you may not notice the issue until data arrives
> 
>   tail -f file.log | grep_typo filter

indeed, annoying.

> Below is a quick hack to support this,
> and tail now terminates promptly for the above cases.

I didn't have a look at the patch below (no time, sorry), but ...

> The implementation is a proof on concept done in a few minutes
> (and may change from poll() to select() if possible).
> A disadvantage is the extra syscalls to do the polling.
> Actually I may be able to combine the existing select()
> with this new poll(), and thus wait for changes in the
> output as well as the inotify descriptor.

... I think this is related to another aspect: should tail consume
more input when the reader following in the pipe terminates?

  $ seq 100000 | { tail -c +5 | sed -n '1{p;q}'; cat; } | head -n5
  3
  505
  15506
  15507
  15508

Although the above is a corner case, POSIX doesn't specify explicitly
for tail(1) what to do when the reader terminates, but it would be nice
to have a deterministic behavior, wouldn't it?

Thanks & have a nice day,
Berny