-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Wednesday, 2017-10-18 at 14:31 +0200, Jan Engelhardt wrote:

On Wednesday 2017-10-18 14:27, Carlos E. R. wrote:

...

cer@Telcontar:~> rpm -ql util-linux-2.28-12.6.1.x86_64 | grep tailf /usr/bin/tailf /usr/share/bash-completion/completions/tailf /usr/share/man/man1/tailf.1.gz cer@Telcontar:~>

""" tailf is deprecated. It may have unfixed bugs and will be removed from util-linux in March 2017. Nowadays it's safe to use tail -f (from coreutils), in contrast to what the original documentation below says. """

Oh. Apparently my previous reply to this got lost. I started using tailf many years ago because some documentation said that "tail -f" caused hard disk activity even when there was nothing new to display, and "tailf" did not. Has this changed? - -- Cheers, Carlos E. R. (from 42.2 x86_64 "Malachite" at Telcontar) -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2 iEYEARECAAYFAlnui7cACgkQtTMYHG2NR9VkLACfTPnFWZgGQeU231DOqpBV0y4v dxcAn3ZFIPIXzbExkcoBg7GNa0lll5cB =+zUF -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org

On 10/24/2017 09:12 AM, Andreas Schwab wrote:

On Okt 24 2017, "Carlos E. R." <robin.listas@telefonica.net> wrote:

...

I started using tailf many years ago because some documentation said that "tail -f" caused hard disk activity even when there was nothing new to display, and "tailf" did not.

Has this changed?

coreutils' tail now uses inotify when possible.

more info: "when possible" means when the file system type supports it, currently this is: $ wget -q -O - http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/coreutils.git/plain/src/stat.c \ | grep ' case S_MAGIC.* local' \ | sed 's/^.*MAGIC_//;s/:.*$/ /' \ | tr -d '\n' AAFS ADFS AFFS ANON_INODE_FS AUTOFS BALLOON_KVM BEFS BDEVFS BFS BPF_FS BINFMTFS BTRFS BTRFS_TEST CGROUP CGROUP2 COH CONFIGFS CRAMFS CRAMFS_WEND DAXFS DEBUGFS DEVFS DEVPTS ECRYPTFS EFIVARFS EFS EXOFS EXT EXT2 EXT2_OLD F2FS FAT FUTEXFS HFS HFS_PLUS HFS_X HOSTFS HPFS HUGETLBFS MTD_INODE_FS INOTIFYFS ISOFS ISOFS_R_WIN ISOFS_WIN JFFS JFFS2 JFS LOGFS M1FS MINIX MINIX_30 MINIX_V2 MINIX_V2_30 MINIX_V3 MQUEUE MSDOS NILFS NSFS NTFS OPENPROM PROC PSTOREFS QNX4 QNX6 RAMFS RDTGROUP REISERFS ROMFS RPC_PIPEFS SECURITYFS SELINUX SMACK SOCKFS SQUASHFS SYSFS SYSV2 SYSV4 TMPFS TRACEFS UBIFS UDF UFS UFS_BYTESWAPPED USBDEVFS V9FS VZFS WSLFS XENFS XENIX XFS XIAFS ZFS ZSMALLOC (EXT2 includes EXT3/4, as these do not have a different MAGIC number.) The ones not supporting inotify (reliably) are (change 'local' to 'remote' in the above pattern): ACFS AFS AUFS CEPH CIFS CODA FHGFS FUSEBLK FUSECTL GFS GPFS IBRIX KAFS LUSTRE NCP NFS NFSD OCFS2 OVERLAYFS PANFS PIPEFS PRL_FS SMB SMB2 SNFS VMHGFS VXFS In the case of an FS for which tail is not using inotify, you could still instruct it to be nicer to the disk by increasing the interval to check for changes: -s, --sleep-interval=N with -f, sleep for approximately N seconds (default 1.0) between iterations; OT: usually, the user probably wants 'tail -F' rather 'tail -f'; from 'tail --help': With --follow (-f), tail defaults to following the file descriptor, which means that even if a tail'ed file is renamed, tail will continue to track its end. This default behavior is not desirable when you really want to track the actual name of the file, not the file descriptor (e.g., log rotation). Use --follow=name in that case. That causes tail to track the named file in a way that accommodates renaming, removal and creation. ... and of course in the docs, e.g. https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/tail Have a nice day, Berny -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org