I was recently looking into using tail -f
to monitor some text files like so: tail -f /var/sometext
.
However, when I did some testing, it doesn't seem to work. What I did was I created a new file and ran: tail -f /home/name/text
Then, I opened the log in vim and did some editing, saved it, and it seems that tail is not "seeing" the change.
The weird thing is, running echo "hello" >> /home/name/text
seems to work fine (tail sees the change). I read somewhere this has something to do with file descriptors and new inodes being created when saving a file.
Can someone explain this for me? I didn't quite get how this actually works, but I have an idea what file descriptors are though.