Linux – Pipe ‘tail -f’ to awk is not hanging

Pipe ‘tail -f’ to awk is not hanging… here is a solution to the problem.

Pipe ‘tail -f’ to awk is not hanging

Something like this hangs :

tail -f textfile | awk '{print $0}'

Grep does not hang when used in place of AWK.

My actual intention is to add color to some log output using only standard commands; However, it seems that feeding tail -f into awk will not work. I don’t know if this is a buffer issue, but I’ve tried something that didn’t work, like:

awk '{print $0; fflush()}'

There are also How to pipe tail -f into awk

Any ideas?

Solution

I’m having almost the exact same issue as mawk. I think this is due to the way mawk flushes its buffer, and the problem disappears when I switch to gawk. Hope this helps (I know it’s a bit late).

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