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TAILF(1) User Commands TAILF(1)

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.

output the last N lines, instead of the last 10.
Output version information and exit.
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/.

February 2003 util-linux