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From: wcs@cbnewsh.ATT.COM (Bill Stewart 201-949-0705 ho95c.att.com!wcs)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions,comp.bugs.sys5,comp.bugs.4bsd
Subject: Does tail still need the 4K byte limit?
Message-ID: <378@cbnewsh.ATT.COM>
Date: 2 May 89 21:18:08 GMT
References: <316@cbnewsh.ATT.COM> <10383@ihlpb.ATT.COM>	<1618@attdso.att.com>
Reply-To: wcs@cbnewsh.ATT.COM (Bill Stewart 201-949-0705 ho95c.att.com!wcs)
Organization: Your typical phone company involved in your typical daydream
Lines: 28

TAIL(1)	 (Directory and	File Management	Utilities)     TAIL(1)
BUGS
  Tails	relative to the	end of the file	are stored in a
  buffer, and thus are limited in length.  Various kinds of
  anomalous behavior may happen	with character special files.

WARNING
  The tail command will	only tail the last 4096	bytes of a
  file regardless of its line count.

Page 1					   (last mod. 2/11/88)

This was all very well in PDP-11 days, when you wanted a nice little
utility that didn't use much memory.  But now that "everybody" has
virtual memory, there's no reason to retain this behavior; you can
still make the initial  buffer size be 4K to keep the  "V7 > 4.2"
people happy, and malloc more memory as needed so that tail always
does what you ask it to.

Has anybody written a public domain version of tail?  Is this fixed
in SVR4 or 4.3bsd?  Is it time to write GNUtail?

		Thanks;  Bill
-- 
# Bill Stewart, AT&T Bell Labs 2G218 Holmdel NJ 201-949-0705 ho95c.att.com!wcs
# also found at 201-271-4712 tarpon.att.com!wcs 

# welcome, to mars, eh, hosers!  Have a brew and some donuts, eh?