Thanks; I will experiment a bit further. Just one quick note, though: `tail -r` works fine on macOS. It does not on linux, which I assume is where you ran your experiment. On (most? all?) linux system you have the `tac` command that does the same thing: It collects lines from stdin and outputs them in reverse order. So no, I don't buy the hypothesis that my problem arises from a failed pipeline. But as I said, I will experiment some more and report back.