How do you determine the actual command that is piping into you?

the pipe will appear as an entry in the list of open filedescriptors of your process:

 % ls -l /proc/PID/fd
 lr-x------ 1 xyz xyz 64 Feb 11 08:05 0 -> pipe:[124149866]
 lrwx------ 1 xyz xyz 64 Feb 11 08:05 1 -> /dev/pts/2
 lrwx------ 1 xyz xyz 64 Feb 11 08:05 2 -> /dev/pts/2
 lr-x------ 1 xyz xyz 64 Feb 11 08:05 10 -> /tmp/foo.sh

you could also use something like:

 % lsof -p PID
 sh      29890 xyz  cwd    DIR   0,44    4096  77712070 /tmp
 sh      29890 xyz  rtd    DIR   0,44    4096  74368803 /
 sh      29890 xyz  txt    REG   0,44   83888  77597729 /bin/dash
 sh      29890 xyz  mem    REG   0,44 1405508  79888619 /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc-2.11.1.so
 sh      29890 xyz  mem    REG   0,44  113964  79874782 /lib/ld-2.11.1.so
 sh      29890 xyz    0r  FIFO    0,6         124149866 pipe
 sh      29890 xyz    1u   CHR  136,2                 4 /dev/pts/2
 sh      29890 xyz    2u   CHR  136,2                 4 /dev/pts/2
 sh      29890 xyz   10r   REG   0,44      66  77712115 /tmp/foo.sh

so, than you have the inode of the pipe :) you can now search every other process under /proc/ for that pipe. then you will have the command that is piping to you:

 % lsof | grep 124149866 
 cat     29889 xyz    1w  FIFO                0,6          124149866 pipe
 sh      29890 xyz    0r  FIFO                0,6          124149866 pipe

in this example, cat piped to wards sh. in /proc/29889 you can find a file called cmdline which tells you, what exactly was called:

 % cat /proc/29889/cmdline
 cat/dev/zero%  

the fields of the command line are separated by NUL, thus it looks a bit ugly :)

Akira suggested using lsof.

Here's how you could script it:

whatpipe2.sh

#!/bin/bash

pid=$$
pgid=$(ps -o pgid= -p $pid)
lsofout=$(lsof -g $pgid)
pipenode=$(echo "$lsofout" | awk '$5 == "0r" { print $9 }')
otherpids=$(echo "$lsofout" | awk '$5 == "1w" { print $2 }')
for pid in $otherpids; do
    if cmd=$(ps -o cmd= -p $pid 2>/dev/null); then
        echo "$cmd"
        break
    fi
done

Running it:

$ tail -f /var/log/messages | ./whatpipe2.sh
tail -f /var/log/messages
^C

---

Another way is using process groups.

whatpipe1.sh

#!/bin/bash    

pid=$$
# ps output is nasty, can (and usually does) start with spaces
# to handle this, I don't quote the "if test $_pgrp = $pgrp" line below
pgrp=$(ps -o pgrp= -p $pid)
psout=$(ps -o pgrp= -o pid= -o cmd=)
echo "$psout" | while read _pgrp _pid _cmd; do
    if test $_pgrp = $pgrp; then
        if test $_pid != $pid; then
            case $_cmd in
            ps*)
                # don't print the "ps" we ran to get this info
                # XXX but this actually means we exclude any "ps" command :-(
                ;;
            *)
                echo "$_cmd"
                ;;
            esac
        fi
    fi
done

Running it:

$ tail -f /var/log/messages | ./whatpipe1.sh
tail -f /var/log/messages
^C

---

Note they both only work if the command on the left side of the pipe runs for long enough for ps to see it. You said you were using it with tail -f, so I doubt this is an issue.

$ sleep 0 | ./whatpipe1.sh 

$ sleep 1 | ./whatpipe1.sh
sleep 1