[illumos-Developer] [REVIEW] 244: Need replacement for closed /usr/bin/tail and /usr/xpg4/bin/tail

[Garrett D'Amore]

On Wed, 2010-09-22 at 17:21 +0200, I. Szczesniak wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 2:31 PM, Garrett D'Amore <garrett at nexenta.com> wrote:
> > Does the ksh93 tail work well?  I had heard that there were some
> > situations where it was busted, but I've not researched it myself.
> 
> To my knowledge AST tail version in ON B146 has 2 known bugs:
> - tail -0f will cat the whole file before following it. The tail.c in
> Roland's prototype40 tree has this fixed.

I think it was this problem that was what had been complained about.
Unfortunately, we don't have that code in illumos, and I have no idea
how to go about getting it from Roland's private workspace (and there is
of course the question of whether doing so is a good idea or not....)

> - Suspending the tail builtin *within* ksh93 and resuming it causes
> SIGTERM to be ignored. This is a bug in all 64bit versions of ksh93,
> affecting all builtin commands which use poll() in combination with
> custom signal handlers and not a bug in AST tail. Using tail via
> /usr/bin/alias is not effected by this issue.

That sounds like an unfortunate bug.  I hope someone will fix it.

It would be good to have a record of that in the illumos bug tracking
system.

	- Garrett