How is there no problem to solve when the post clearly identifies a problem, as well as why the behavior is confusing to a user?

“The system is working as it was designed,” is always true but unhelpful.

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YZF 7 months ago | parent [-]

I get that. But it's like complaining why your pliers aren't good at unscrewing a bolt. I'm willing to accept the UX isn't great but `tail -f | grep` is like `vim | grep` or `rogue | grep` (I'm exaggerating to try and make a point). `tail -f` is also if I'm not mistaken a much more recent development vs. the origins of the Unix command line pipes.

So sure, it would maybe be a better UX to be able to combine things and have them work, but there is fundamental tension between building something that's optimized for moving chunks of data and building things that's interactive. And trying to force one into the other, in my humble opinion, is not the solution.

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kiitos 7 months ago | parent [-]

> `tail -f | grep` is like `vim | grep` or `rogue | grep`

I think this position is user-hostile.

`vim` and `rogue` are fully user-interactive programs. The same is not true of `tail -f`, which by default appears to users as a stream of lines.

I understand why, at a technical level, `tail -f | grep` doesn't work in the way that's expected here. But it should! At least, when invoked from a user-interactive shell session -- in that context, a "chunk of data" is clearly expected to be a newline-delimited line, not a buffer of some implicitly-defined size.

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dullcrisp 7 months ago | parent [-]

In fact, `tail -f | grep` works the way they expect. What doesn’t work is `tail -f | grep | grep`.

It’s hard to argue that grep isn’t supposed to work like this when grep tries to work like this. It’s not a fundamental tension, it’s just that isatty(stdout) doesn’t always tell you when you’re running in an interactive terminal.

	▲	YZF 7 months ago \| parent [-]
		That's a good point. If the proposal is to propagate that all the way through the pipe chain I'd support that. My gut negative reaction is to the complexity of adding flush timers.