Unix tail bug?

The UNIX tail command is probably one of the most widely used Unix commands. There seems to be a "bug" if you want to call it that in its functionality.

Try running a tail -5 on a directory where the files have data being written into them continuously like log files. Something like "tail -5 *" which should get you just the last 5 lines from each of the files in the directory.

However, try running it a few times and you will be surprised to see that for few of the files more than 5 lines are displayed!!

If you are unlucky enough to use this in a shell script that required just 5 lines and no more, the script will keep failing few times but seem to work just fine at other times. A transient bug which can slide pass the best testing.

This is something that happens only when you use wild cards to specify the files. So presumably the error happens because the command fails to realize its already read a particular file. Using other non-standard utilities like since or multitail might solve the problem.The programmer could even become intelligent and read just the top 5 lines of the output of tail!! for each file.

More importantly is this a bug with Unix tail or with the wildcards or just a undesired side effect we have to live with? I could see this "bug" in my 9.8. Not sure if this thing is endemic to this flavor. When i tried the same in the GNU core utilities and opensuse, i have to use the correct version "tail -n 5 *" and this works fine. Its always better to have the GNU core utilities than using the standard utilities that come with some of the less frequently updated flavors .