TAILF

Section: Linux Programmer's Manual (1)
Updated: 11 Jan 1996
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Copyright 1996 Rickard E. Faith (mailto:r.faith@ieee.org)
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NAME

tailf - follow the growth of a log file

SYNOPSIS

tailf file

DESCRIPTION

tailf will print out the last 10 lines of a file and then wait for the file to grow. It is similar to tail -f but does not access the file when it is not growing. This has the side effect of not updating the access time for the file, so a filesystem flush does not occur periodically when no log activity is happening.

tailf is extremely useful for monitoring log files on a laptop when logging is infrequent and the user desires that the hard disk spin down to conserve battery life.

BUGS

An option could be provided to print out the last n lines instead of the last 10.

AUTHOR

This program was written by Rik Faith (faith@cs.unc.edu) and may be freely distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. There is ABSOLUTELY NO WARANTY for this program.

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