Sorry I wasn't clear enough in my explaination.

You need to put the brackets on the outside to make the combination of tail -f's act like a single 'tail -f'. That was my real conceptual misunderstanding the first time around.

If you just do all the 'tail &' without bracketing them you get dumped back into the shell immediately which isn't the sort of behavior I was thinking about, although perfectly valid in many cases.

Noah