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).
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/.