Does tail still need the 4K byte limit?

Don Faulkner faulkner at jmullins.harvard.edu
Wed May 3 22:37:29 AEST 1989


In article <378 at cbnewsh.ATT.COM> wcs at cbnewsh.ATT.COM (Bill Stewart 201-949-0705 ho95c.att.com!wcs) writes:

tail...

Bill> WARNING
Bill>   The tail command will	only tail the last 4096	bytes of a
Bill>   file regardless of its line count.
Bill> Is this fixed
Bill> in SVR4 or 4.3bsd?  Is it time to write GNUtail?

from "trace tail -3 /etc/hosts" on sun os 4.0.1:

...
open ("/etc/hosts", 0, 07) = 0
lseek (0, 0, 1) = 0
fstat (0, 0x4540) = 0
lseek (0, -32768, 2) = 272434
read (0, "smr12.army.mil\n192.5.11.13     i".., 32769) = 32768
read (0, "", 1) = 0
...

Looks like it picks the last 32k ...
(my hosts file is 300k)
Ciao!
--

 Don Faulkner                                       
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