piping output of tail running in background

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Not sure why this does not work in bash:
tail -f err.log |&
-bash: syntax error near unexpected token `&'

I am attempting to continuously read a file that is being updated by doing a "tail -f" on the file and piping the output to stdin which can then be read by the next shell command

Thnx

2

Hi,
What's sort of next unix command do you want to apply on the continious tail ?

3

What you are trying is co-processing and not piping.

piping would be something like this:

ls -l | pg

In the above example output of the ls -l command is piped to pg, which will display the output in page break ups.

refer to this thread

4

Thanks for the replies. Excuse my using wrong terminology - yes i was attempting a coprocess by "tailing" a log file and have its stdout be read by a read in the current script - something like this...

tail -f $LOGFILE |&
while read -p line

I found my problem was with the shell that i was using. It does not work in the bash shell but does work in ksh.

5 
tail -f $LOGFILE | \
while read -p line
...

or

tail -f $LOGFILE | while read -p line
...