tail -f into grep into cut not working properly
the problem is almost certainly related to how grep and cut buffer their output. here's a hack that should get you around the problem, though i'm sure there are prettier ways to do it:
tail -f /var/somelog | while read line; do echo "$line" | grep "some test and p l a c e h o l d e r" | cut -f 3,4,14 -d " "; done(don't forget the ; done at the end of the command)
alternatively, because gawk doesn't buffer it's output, you could use it in place of cut to avoid the cumbersome while loop:
tail -f log | grep --line-buffered "some test and p l a c e h o l d e r" | gawk '{print $3,$4,$14}'check out http://www.pixelbeat.org/programming/stdio_buffering/ for more info on buffering problems.