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From: rees@pisa.ifs.umich.edu (Jim Rees)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re: problems piping into 'tail'
Message-ID: <1990Aug2.224337.17310@terminator.cc.umich.edu>
Date: 2 Aug 90 22:43:37 GMT
References: <2011@ns-mx.uiowa.edu> <1990Aug1.022258.7408@metro.ucc.su.OZ.AU>
Sender: usenet@terminator.cc.umich.edu (usenet news)
Reply-To: rees@citi.umich.edu (Jim Rees)
Organization: University of Michigan IFS Project
Lines: 31

In article <1990Aug1.022258.7408@metro.ucc.su.OZ.AU>, jimr@metro (Jim
Richardson) writes:
  In article <2011@ns-mx.uiowa.edu>, jlhaferman@l_cae07.icaen.uiowa.edu
(Jeffrey
  Lawrence Haferman) writes:
  > 
  > SR 10.2, /bin/csh is my shell, I can't get
  > 
  >    history | tail -15
  > 
  > to work.  'history' works fine, tail <filename> works
  > fine, I can't get the pipe to work.  Ideas?

This works for me.  It may depend on whether you're in a pad, xterm, or
what. "history" is a builtin and may have redirection strangeness (the
redirection is done in an entirely different way from how it's done for
normal commands).

  I haven't observed this problem with history: perhaps it depends on how
  many lines the history contains.  However, I have similar problems with
  commands like
  
  	tail -300 syslogd.log

"tail" has a limit on how many lines it can store up, although it should
fail gracefully.

The "tail" man page seems to be out of date.  In particular, the '-f' option
works but is undocumented.  This is terribly useful for files like
syslogd.log.  It monitors the file and regularly prints out any extra lines
that came in recently.