Is there a command-line tool that can read from a file and write the file's contents to stdout, blocking on EOF?

Question

Is there anything like tail –f that also works well with binary files and supports exit conditions like "on pid X death" or so?

Answer 1

ISTM that tail –f works with binary files.  Is there any particular requirement you have that you believe tail won’t satisfy?

The original philosophy on Unix was to keep things simple.  While its commercialization may have taken it away from that principle, I wouldn’t expect to find a single program that did file I/O and also monitored the health of other processes.  The best way to get the exit conditions you want may be to write a shell script and wrap it around tail –f.