tail -f

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <412 at fedeva.UUCP> jbr0871 at fedeva.UUCP (Blaine Robertson) writes:
>Can someone please tell me how 'tail -f' works?.  Obviously, it does not
>do a busy loop while doing a stat on the file.

All it does is to sleep for a short time (around one second), then
copy out everything past the last high water mark via read/write.
There is no statting, no asynchronous notification, no nonblocking
I/O, etc.  It IS a "busy loop" (except for the short sleep).