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The -f option to tail says don't close STDOUT, and just keep reading the file and output forever. Since STDOUT isn't closed, your program's read doesn't complete.
If enough data gets pushed through the pipe, your program will eventually get some data on the read, but not until then.
If you want your program to read a growing file, do it internally, not with an external tool.
I'm not totally sure on what your trying to acheive but looking at the fact your trying to do a tail -f and then constantly read data there...i may sugest looking at mkfifo
Take a look it may be what your looking for, this isn't a file though and data written to it won't be stored, its simply a method to pass data from one program to another
Right, but the point is, if you are going to use read(), just read() continually, with a timeout on the read() until the program terminates with a SIGQUIT. Your program is duplicating the behavior of tail -f, so just do it yourself.
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