tail does not exit

[Mikhail Teterin]

четвер 20 грудень 2007 11:58 до, Erik Osterholm Ви написали:
> Ah, I see.  With very, very long lines, tail doesn't send the output
> all at once. The cutoff seems to be 65536 bytes on my system.

They don't even have to be very very long -- unless in an artificial example, 
such as the one I posted. Normal-width text files can also trigger 
inconsistent behavior in some real-life scenario, where awk actually does 
some real processing of its input for a while. The awk script may decide to 
quit after processing the first 1000 (normal-length) lines, for example... 

The behavior of the program will then be different depending on whether the 
average line-length is above, at, or below 65.536 characters.

Maybe, it is awk's fault -- it should not be read-ing more than one line at a 
time, because the script may cause it to ignore some of the read data.

Using line-buffering or some such?

 -mi