TAILF

Section: User Commands (1)
Updated: July 2014
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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 the given file and then wait for this 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.

-n, --lines=number, -number: Output the last number lines, instead of the last 10.
-V, --version: Display version information and exit.
-h, --help: Display help text 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).

AVAILABILITY

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