#48 Tail is not working right...

[Mikhail T.]

I'm using the version 0.6.1 installed by the FreeBSD-port. I noticed, that sometimes -- certainly when a file is still written to by other systems using the same fileserver -- tail(1) acts bizarrely, outputing many more lines than requested. For example:

tail anttask.log | wc -l
      78

Worse, those 78 lines it outputs, are not the last ones in the file... Close to the end, but far from it. It is tempting to suspect tail itself, but the utility works perfectly fine with files -- however active -- on other filesystems, both local and NFS alike...

[Mikhail Kshevetskiy]

could you try 0.6.2 ?

[Mikhail T.]

Tried 0.6.3 today. The lines are now counted correctly -- tail, actually, outputs 10 lines.

But the -f flag is ineffective -- although the file continues to grow on the server, and clients accessing the server via NFS see the growth -- my FreeBSD client using smbnetfs does not detect the changes. Not until I restart tail.