Bug in tail when following files(?)

[Peter Postmus]

Hi,

I think i may have found a bug in tail. Recently I have tried to let my Linux 
server/router automatically read each new line that is added 
to /var/log/messages, through my speakers. I use the Festival text-to-speech 
engine (http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/) to do so. So, when 
issuing the command

tail -n1 -f /var/log/messages |./festival --tts

I expected to hear just that - every newline. Instead, the speech will stop 
after a number of words have been spoken (the number is not always the same). 
However, when the -f option is omitted, the last log entry is spoken 
completely. That's why I suspect this to be a problem in tail, not is 
Festival.

The strange thing is, if i just run

tail -n1 -f /var/log/messages

everything is fine: each newline is printed to stdout. The problem arises when 
I connect Festival to the pipe. So that seems to indicate that the problem 
has to do with festival. I'm not sure though. Any help on this would be 
greatly appreciated.

-- 
Met vriendelijke groeten,
With kind regards,

Peter Postmus