On Tue, 19 Jan 2021 13:46:18 +0000, Pancho
 wrote:

> Yeah that is kind of the point, I'm a mediocre old programmer, I don't
> want to know everything about everything. What I want is an easy life. I
> want a basic technique to work, reliably, environment agnostically as
> possible.
>
> I think this clarifies in my mind why I wouldn't ever use this technique
> to observe events in practice. It is too fragile.

FWIW:
I use gawk to follow logfiles, and the fflush() function to
flush the output buffers.


Snippet of Bash script :
tail -f -n $TLINES $LOGFILE \
 | gawk -f $SCRIPT.awk \
 | sqlite3 $DATABASE

pseudocode of $SCRIPT.awk :
 process every input line
 console output to "/dev/stderr"
 -> realtime filtered, reformatted view
 SQL statements to stdout
 -> statistics
 After processing every input line:
 fflush()

--
Regards,
Kees Nuyt

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05