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Tanktalus
<p>I'm trying to figure out where you get the idea that the contents are passed to tail's stdin. It's not. The full path to the file (as given by the shell - full path if searched via PATH, relative path if PATH not used) is passed in.</p>
<p>Compare the output of "<c>strace ./a</c>" and "<c>strace /usr/bin/tail -n2 < a</c>". The former has a call to "open" and all reading is done from filehandle 3. The latter doesn't call open, and all reading is done from filehandle 0.</p>
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