many tails

[Mike - EMAIL IGNORED]

On Tue, 05 Dec 2006 14:03:56 -0500, Mike - EMAIL IGNORED wrote:

> On FC4 with KDE, I ran ps -ef and noticed that there
> were many old /usr/bin/tail processes.  They all
> looked like tail -f that I had run.  I wrote
> a script to kill -9 them.  I ran tests and found
> that if I exit tail -f with ctrl-c the processes
> disappears, but if I close a KDE window on a
> tail -f without ctrl.c, the processes persists.
> 
> Is this the way it should be?
> 
> Thanks for your comments.
> Mike.

I started to try the strace suggestion, and to
simplify things, I logged in as root, rather than
user followed by su - .  To my surprise, the
problem disappeared.  Therefore, to demonstrate
the problem:
   1. log in as user (not root)
   2. (in my case) startx
   3. pop a Shell Konsole
   4  su -
   5. tail -f /var/log/<some log file you can send to>
   6. click the x to kill the Konsole
   7. pop another Shell Konsole
   8. su -
   9. ps -ef | grep tail
  10. I find that the tail process persists
But not if the original login is root.  I wonder if anyone
else can reproduce this.

I hear from above that it is now bedtime at -0500, so I'll
try the strace tomorrow.  Thanks for your interest.

Mike.