many tails

[Mike - EMAIL IGNORED]

On Tue, 05 Dec 2006 19:47:19 +0000, Andy Green wrote:

> 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?
> 
> I believe so... if the tail did not subsequently try to show any more 
> output.  Only when it tries to issue more output to the now gone-away 
> terminal session would it get a signal that would end up killing it.
> 
> -Andy

PROBLEM SOLVED but there may be another.  I have confirmed
Andy's description. The reason that I had many persistent
tail processes is that I run swatch with the --tail-file
option.  When I kill a swatch process, it leaves a tail
processes behind, but the tail process no longer receives
input.  (I discovered this the hard way -- a day after
killing all my tails, I found that my swatch was no longer
reporting.)

The new problem:  what to do (automatically) to eliminate the
tail when I kill a swatch?

Thanks,
Mike.