tail -f problem

[Scott Alexander]

All,

This is my first post to this list, so please excuse missing information
that is normally seen in a possible problem with cygwin.  Here goes...

In my career, I'm a software consultant, doing QA on a web client/server
application.  Part of my investigation of issues is looking at the realtime
log files of our web server (IIS in this instance).  Under linux, tail -f,
across a smbmount will perform exactly what I need to parse and view the log
files as activity happens (I also use a cut to kill a few fields that aren't
needed).  Problem is, my main machine isn't linux and there isn't another
linux machine around here for me to do this with (the only linux machine is
a mail server which does not have a route to the areas I need to view).

With cygwin's tail, the output is not quite the same as the linux version of
tail.  With Cygwin's version, I will get output with tail -f, but the
updates aren't "realtime" as the linux version -- the updates are barely
shown at all, if ever.  Here are the different methods I used to try and
parse the IIS log file:

1.  Map the share of the logfile with my Windows XP machine to say Z:, etc,
use cygwin.bat to launch a bash.exe shell, go to the logfile directory and
tail -f name.log.

2.  Terminal Service to the machine, go cmd.exe (with cygwin in the path),
CD to the logfile folder and tail -f name.log.

3.  Use cygwin.bat to invoke bash.exe, go to my local logfile folder and
tail -f the contents of name.log.

Either of these ways to access the logfile will give me the first 5 (or X
lines, using the -n option) lines, then pretty much "stop" outputting, or
slow the outputs to a virtual crawl.  I must CTRL-C to break out the tail,
and start it over to get the output starting again.  I've tried using
the -s, to sleep tail and have it try again, but this did not increase the
output at all.

Here are more version #s and machine info:

My workstation:  Dell laptop, Windows XP (non SP1
My servers: Dell rackmount, Windows 2000/SP2, IIS.
Cygwin version:  1.3.19-1
Tail version:  February 19, 2002, 3:26:34 PM

I am very willing to answer questions anyone has, because I would like to
know if anyone else has the same problem.

Thanks,
-Scott







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