Oh! Sooo, you want your one-liner to have error recovery too:)

I had a devil of a job trying to simulate this without a network. Eventually, I tailed (slowly) a file on a my CD drive and the opened the tray.

Originally I had thought that using seek F, 0, 1 or die... to try and 'move' the file pointer without moving it would work but the OS noticed that the CD wasn't there and popped up a nice freindly dialogue suggesting I put it back! It might work on a network drive, it might not.

What I came up with was using -e to check that the file is still there, which seems to work fine with my CD drive. The error is reported by perl even before the CD has stopped spinning. You'll have to tell me if this works when a networked drive becomes disconnected.

perl -e"open F, '<', $ARGV[0] or die $!; while(1){ print <F>; -e $ARGV
+[0] or die 'The file went away'; Win32::Sleep 100 }" file
[download]

It's got a bit long for a one-liner now, but it could probably be golfed :) I keep thinking it might be possible to use <code>perl -pe"..." and defeat the eof detection, but I haven't figured out how yet.

Any takers?