Do a tail -F until matching a pattern

Question

I want to do a tail -F on a file until matching a pattern. I found a way using awk, but IMHO my command is not really clean. The problem is that I need to d

Answer 1

Try this:

sh -c 'tail -n +0 -f /tmp/foo | { sed "/EOF/ q" && kill $$ ;}'

The whole command-line will exit as soon as the "EOF" string is seen in /tmp/foo.

There is one side-effect: the tail process will be left running (in the background) until anything is written to /tmp/foo.