bug#24495: tail -F does not terminate when running out of names to watch

[Bernhard Voelker]

On 09/21/2016 08:15 PM, Pádraig Brady wrote:
> We can get expected behavior option 1 with the attached patch.
> Note that's inconsistent with current inotify behavior which does
> _not_ actually give up on the name, as can be seen when starting
> with a (non existent) file:
> 
> $ touch foo
> $ tail -F foo&
> [1] 13624
> $ rm foo; mkdir foo
> tail: ‘foo’ has become inaccessible: No such file or directory
> tail: ‘foo’ has been replaced with an untailable file; giving up on this name
> $ rmdir foo; echo foo > foo
> tail: ‘foo’ has become inaccessible: No such file or directory
> tail: ‘foo’ has appeared;  following new file
> foo
> 
> The attached patch also removes the "; giving up on this name"
> message in the inotify case as that's not the case.
> 
> Ideally we'd have expected behavior option 2
> both with and without inotify.
> I'll need to look a bit more as to why we have that
> limitation without inotify.

The new behavior is nice, but it would really be better to have
consistent behavior in inotify and polling mode.

Thanks & have a nice day,
Berny