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TAILF

Section: User Commands (1)
Updated: February 2003
Index Return to Main Contents

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NAME

tailf - follow the growth of a log file  

SYNOPSIS

tailf [OPTION] 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.

Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too.

-n, --lines=N, -N

output the last N lines, instead of the last 10.

-V, --version

Output version information and exit.

-h, --help

Display help and exit.

 

AUTHOR

This program was originally written by Rik Faith (faith@acm.org) and may be freely distributed under the terms of the X11/MIT License. There is ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY for this program.

The latest inotify based implementation was written by Karel Zak (kzak@redhat.com).  

SEE ALSO

tail(1), less(1)  

AVAILABILITY

The tailf command is part of the util-linux package and is available from ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/.

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Index

NAME

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

AUTHOR

SEE ALSO

AVAILABILITY

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