On 13 March 2015 at 09:00, Ruediger Meier <sweet_f_a@xxxxxx> wrote: > As far as I understood tailf's advantage over "tail -f" is that it does > not access the file when it does not grow. But nowadays > coreutils "tail -f" also does not seem to access the file. So do we > really need tailf? > > The point is that I've noticed that our tailf fails to deal with > filesystems where inotify is broken. For example it does not work for > overlayfs. coreutils tail code looks quite complicated and seems to > manage such cases. Is it worth to fix our tailf or better just remove > it and use "tail -f"? > > BTW coreutils tail is much more comfortable. It has many important > options. For example watching log files without -F or --retry does not > make sense to me (because of logrotate). > > Last but not least, is anybody using tailf at all? Google does not find > much about people who are using this. I'm in favor slapping deprecated note to tailf. When I double tab my bash the result is: Display all 3227 possibilities? (y or n) and I think that's too many. Reducing number of commands where similar functionality is provided elsewhere should result to better overall software quality, and a system that is earlier to learn to use. Less really is more in this case. -- Sami Kerola http://www.iki.fi/kerolasa/ -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe util-linux" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
