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

Another option: use a redirect to subshell. This changes the order in which background processes are started, so $! gives PID of the tail process.

tail -f $1 > >(nc -l -p 9977) &
wait $!

Answer 2

Write tail's PID to file descriptor 3, and then capture it from there.

( tail -f $1 & echo $! >&3 ) 3>pid | nc -l -p 9977
kill $(<pid)

Answer 3

Have you tried:

nc -l -p 9977 -c "tail -f $1"

(untested)

Or -e with a scriptfile if your nc doesn't have -c. You may have to have an nc that was compiled with the GAPING_SECURITY_HOLE option. Yes, you should infer appropriate caveats from that option name.

Answer 4

You could use the coproc command twice.

The given example translates to:

coproc TAIL { tail -f $1; }; exec {TAIL[1]}<&-
coproc NC { nc -v -l -p 9977; } <&"${TAIL[0]}" >&1
wait $NC_PID; echo "nc exit code: $!"
kill $TAIL_PID; echo "done"

(I've thrown a -v and a couple echo in there for troubleshooting.)

Using coproc feels a lot like using Popen() in various other scripting languages.

Answer 5

You may store the pid of the tail command in a variable using Bash I/O redirections only (see How to get the PID of a process in a pipeline).

# terminal window 1
# using nc on Mac OS X (FreeBSD nc)
: > /tmp/foo
PID=$( { { tail -f /tmp/foo 0<&4 & echo $! >&3 ; } 4<&0 | { nc -l 9977 ;} & } 3>&1 | head -1 )
kill $PID

# terminal window 2
nc localhost 9977

# terminal window 3
echo line > /tmp/foo

Answer 6

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" </dev/null   # terminal window 1
ncat localhost 9977 </dev/null                  # terminal window 2
echo hello > file.log                           # terminal window 3