title: Tail -f piped to > awk piped to file > file does not work
body: <p>Having trouble to wrap my head around piping and potential buffering issue.  I am trying to perform set of operations piped that seem to break at some piping level.  To simplify , I narrowed it down to 3 piping operations that do not work correctly</p>
  
  <p><code>tail -f | awk '{print $1}' &gt; file</code>  </p>
  
  <p>results in no data redirected to the file , however </p>
  
  <p><code>tail -f | awk '{print $1}'</code>  </p>
  
  <p>results are output to stdout fine</p>
  
  <p>also </p>
  
  <p><code>tail -10 | awk '{print $1}' &gt; file</code>  </p>
  
  <p>works fine as well.  </p>
  
  <p>thinking it might be buffering issue, tried </p>
  
  <p><code>tail -f | unbuffer awk '{print $1}' &gt; file</code>  </p>
  
  <p>what produced no positive results </p>
  
  <p>(note: in original request, i have more operation in between using grep <code>--line-buffer</code>, but the problem was narrowed down to 3 piped commands <code>tail -f | awk &gt; file</code></p>