dserodio has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I'm new around here, so please excuse me if this is anwered elsewhere. I'm writing a script that uses File::Tail to read lines from a log file. However, if I exit (eg Ctrl-C) from the script, the most recently added lines won't be read, so I'd like to catch SIGQUIT and SIGTERM to read the remaining lines, no matter what File::Tail's interval is. How can I do that? TIA

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Re: Clean exit using File::Tail
by tadman (Prior) on May 16, 2001 at 02:26 UTC
    There is an internal variable called %SIG which is used to trap signals, such as: 
    sub QuitHandler { do_cleanup(); }

$SIG{'QUIT'} = \&QuitHandler;

    [download]
    You can catch everything, but be sure that you don't make it impossible to KILL your program.
[reply]
[d/l]
      Cool, but how do I tell File::Tail to cleanup, ie read the remaining lines before exiting?
[reply]

        Looking at the docs for File::Tail I might recommend you upgrade to version .98 if you have .60.

        It appears that you could add the reset_tail=>0 parameter to the 'new' method, then close and reopen the file causing the mod to immediately reread the file. Also you could brutishly set maxinterval very low.
        Untested, though.

[reply]
        What happens if your QuitHandler calls exit (and/or your File::Tail object goes out of scope)?
        Update: You might also consider calling the nowait method.

        --isotope
        http://www.skylab.org/~isotope/
[reply]

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