Following a file, or cloning tail

[Cameron Laird]

In article <8F62AF73Egmcmhypernetcom at 199.171.54.194>,
Gordon McMillan <gmcm at hypernet.com> wrote:
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>Um, you said you had to be portable. Not only is tail not standard on 
>Windows, but os.popen is flaky there too (depending on circumstances too 
>painful to enumerate).
I think I'm going to start growling every time
I hear that.  To be precise:  popen* flakiness
is one of the chief discouragements in my use
of Python (which is, I recognize, slightly
skewed from other's).
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>However, tail (usually - some implementations differ) does almost what the 
>following code does. Note that even this isn't portable, because Windows 
>doesn't have ino's to check. I have the code this is extracted from 7x24 
Guys, guys:  there are enough seriously hard
problems in the world.  Don't make this one.

Win* FSs don't have i-nodes.  So a portable
formulation of the requirements shouldn't
involve i-node.  That's OK.  Just poll for
either readability or file size.  While I
confess I haven't verified that Py-built-ins
for these are properly portable, they REALLY
need to be if they aren't already, and I'm
willing to write test drivers and demonstra-
tions if these remain in doubt for one more
round of c.l.p dialogue.
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-- 

Cameron Laird <claird at NeoSoft.com>
Business:  http://www.Phaseit.net
Personal:  http://starbase.neosoft.com/~claird/home.html