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

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

Here the main problem is with $$. If you run command as is, $$ is set not to sh but to the PID of the current shell where command is run.

To make kill work you need to change kill $$ to kill \$$

After that you can safely get rid of --pid=$$ passed to tail command.

Summarising, following will work just fine:

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

Optionally you can pass -n to sed to keep it quiet :)