rbj@icst-cmr.arpa (Root Boy Jim) (12/15/87)
From: Frank Hsu <hsu_f@osupyr.uucp>
5) I called someone in the AT&T Training Center at Dublin, Ohio.
They do not understand why this happen. Could someone in the network
tell me what is happening in the UNIX?
Disgusting! While I can forgive them for not knowing right off the bat -
after all, who knows every option to every command and what will
happen under strange conditions - this person isn't doing their job
very well. They should have called you back with an answer after
reading the source. They should have "covered their tail" better :-)
Sorry that I don't understand what you said. Could you give me the
procedures to keep 'tail' echo new lines back to screen after the file
is zeroed? How do you move 'tail' pointer?
You don't. The other fellow was speaking casually. What he meant was:
"Tail's idea of the end of file is still the same". Of course, it is
possible to write tail so that it looks at other factors, such as the
time of last modification, and print the whole new file. That would be
reasonable on Sys V, where a file can only be truncated to zero length,
but what do you do on a BSD system, where a file can be truncated to
an arbitrary length?
Frank C. Hsu
IRCC
Ohio State Univ.
(Root Boy) Jim Cottrell <rbj@icst-cmr.arpa>
National Bureau of Standards
Flamer's Hotline: (301) 975-5688
A dwarf is passing out somewhere in Detroit!