Pancho  writes:
> I used:
>
> tail -f testfile | mawk...
>
> I used vi to generate files, with newlines, which I appended into the
> testfile, or just echo "stuff..." appended into the test file.
>
> But Richard's example is perfect to demonstrate the problem:
>
>>> $ (seq 9999 | head -c 4095; sleep 2; echo) | mawk '{print}'
>
> Not only does seq quickly generate a byte stream, but it allows you to
> see exactly what byte you are on. I'm not sure why he used the
> brackets () but I left them in as they don't hurt.

If you take them out it means something different.

> I guess he used the echo because he is habitually tidy :-).

I am l-) in this case I wanted one more byte to make up the 4096-byte
input block.

> Maybe the answer is that for reliability I should have used perl
> instead of awk? Maybe perl is more standard?

Perl only has one implementation (albeit many versions of it) so it’s
more predictable in that sense. I doubt it has mawk’s weird approach to
IO, too.

--
https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/

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