Question

Something like this will hang:

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

while grep won’t hang when used instead of awk.

My actual intention is to add color to some log output using merely standard commands; however it seems that piping tail -f into awk won’t work. I don’t know if it’s a buffer problem, but I tried some approaches that haven’t worked, like:

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

and also How to pipe tail -f into awk

Any ideas?

Answer 1

I ran into almost exactly the same problem with mawk. I think it is due to the way mawk is flushing its buffer, the problem went away when I switched to gawk. Hope this helps (a bit late I know).