I am trying to shell comands and I tried tail -f and it does not work. Here is what I did

create a file called new
start a new session run tail -f new
go back to old session and echo new_line >> new
return to tail session to see if it prints out the addition to the file called new.


It just sits and runs. I even tried tail -f -s 1 new and it does not seem to make any difference

(Mandrake 9.1)

Thanks in advance for anyone who can help.

Hi.
feel free to do anyway but mine. :)
{edit}
'man tail' 'man bash'...
The reason it hang's is because the file is less than 10 line's, which is why i specified 'tail -n 1', if it is less then 10 line's it will hang.

On my machine it is work. [Debian]
I using two gnome-term.

dunno if it helps or not but are you in the same directory with both files? (ie are you watching /home/foo/new in one and /tmp/new in another window?)
try it with full pathnames...
example:
touch /tmp/junk
tail -f /tmp/junk

in window two copy and paste this:
date >> /tmp/junk
sleep 5
date >> /tmp/junk
sleep 5
date >> /tmp/junk
sleep 5
date >> /tmp/junk
sleep 5

It work's with mine too...i think the problem he still has is it sitting and looping, in that case you would have to send a EOF (end of file), i don't know what that would be, i just used Ctrl-c. Where are you dcoder, tell if this helped at all.

Hi everyone,
Thanks this helps. tail -fn 1 new.txt works and you are right my file had less than 10 lines in it. I was at work today (school) and I tried it on the debian box and it worked just fine there without the n switch.
again thanks for the help :-)

of cource replace the '/dev/pts/x' with approprate , 'echo $(tty)'.
To terminate 'tail'... Ctrl-c.

Then the file must have been bigger than 10 line's, hmmmm, can you show me the command you used on that box, the one at work that is.
see post #7, i think this is what you wanted, if not oh we'll, 3 hour's of fun to figure it out, and i learned from it too. :)

Hey, I thought this was dead.... thanks for keeping it up :-)
Here is what I just did.
-1 Started a new session and telnet'd into school
-2 Created a file called test.txt and typed in six lines like so
one
two
three
four....
-3 Started a second session and telnet's into school and typed the command tail -f text.txt
-4 Went back to the first session and typed echo seven >> text.txt.

Noticed in the second session that the word seven appeared.

The reason I have interest in this is that students are not allowed to use msn at school so if I tail squid.log and pipe it to grep to look for msn hmmm....;-)

thanks