I have a question, just for curiosity reasons, is there any drawbacks of monitoring server and a text file (e.g Apache log file) using tail and pipe to output the lines to perl script? I want to do it like this so i can control the formatting with the Perl script as i want it to be.

tail -f -n 0 /etc/httpd/logs/access_log | ./readStdin.pl

So the above command is what i run from my Linux www server, the tail command stays real-time in reading the access_log and since that readStdin.pl script is taking input using while (<STDIN>), it waits "indefinitely" for new lines to be formatted and displayed.

I'm just curious if there is some major problem with this kind of monitoring that i haven't even thought about.

Please, comment freely.

In reply to Using pipe and reading from the stdin by mellin

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