Question

In my program I am executing long lived tail (with -f) via execl.
Anything after that call to execl does not get executed.

Do I need to call/execute this tail in background so that I can do other things in my program?

I usually exit out of my program by ctrl C.

Answer 1

The man page for the exec family of calls starts with:

The exec family of functions replaces
the current process image with a
new process image.

Not entirely sure what you want to accomplish, but it looks like exec isn’t the solution. If you want your first program to remain alive, you’ll need to fork. Does your initial program do something with the output of tail -f?