How to get the PID of a process that is piped to another process in Bash?

Question

I am trying to implement a simple log server in Bash. It should take a file as a parameter and serve it on a port with netcat.

( tail -f $1 & ) | nc -l -         


        

Answer 1

Maybe you could use a fifo, so that you can capture the pid of the first process, e.g.:

FIFO=my_fifo

rm -f $FIFO
mkfifo $FIFO

tail -f $1 > $FIFO &
TAIL_PID=$!

cat $FIFO | nc -l -p 9977

kill $TAIL_PID

rm -f $FIFO