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tailf

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@acm.org) and may be freely distributed under the terms of the X11/MIT License. There is ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY for this program.

SEE ALSO

tail(1), less(1)

AVAILABILITY

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