Thursday, October 18, 2012

My version of tail program based on inotify

Honestly speaking there is no intention behind the program I did! It is just for learning and time pass.
So how does linux tail program works?

Earlier it was based on sleep and stat. The program used to stat and check the modified time of file.
If file was modified, the difference used to get printed to stdout. Otherwise, it would go for sleep and check back again.

Recently it seems like the tail program in linux has been changed to use inotify system calls (using strace command). Honestly I realized after writing one of mine. I thought I would publish inotify version of mine. But world is gone way ahead and I am late :-). But still it was very good learning for me. I feel the other unix variant use the earlier version of tail since inotify is specific to linux.

So here is the program. It is quite basic and expect more features in future release :-). Test, raise bugs and provide feedback!
https://github.com/nkumar85/tail

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