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

ncat automatically terminates tail -f on exit (on Mac OS X 10.6.7)!

# simple log server in Bash using ncat
# cf. http://nmap.org/ncat/
touch file.log
ncat -l 9977 -c "tail -f file.log"  file.log                           # terminal window 3