.\" tailf.1 -- man page for tailf
.\" Copyright 1996, 2003 Rickard E. Faith (faith@acm.org)
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.TH TAILF 1 "March 2015" "util-linux" "User Commands"
.SH NAME
tailf \- follow the growth of a log file
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B tailf
[option]
.I file
.SH DESCRIPTION
.B tailf is deprecated.
It may have unfixed bugs and will be removed from util-linux in March 2017.
Nowadays it's safe to use
.B tail -f
(from coreutils), in contrast to what the original documentation below says.
.PP
.B tailf
will print out the last 10 lines of the given \fIfile\fR and then wait
for this \fIfile\fR to grow.  It is similar to
.B 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.
.PP
.B tailf
is extremely useful for monitoring log files on a laptop when logging is
infrequent and the user wishes the hard disk to spin down to conserve
battery life.
.TP
.BR \-n , " -\-lines=\fInumber\fR" , " \-\fInumber\fR"
Output the last
.I number
lines, instead of the last 10.
.TP
\fB\-V\fR, \fB\-\-version
Display version information and exit.
.TP
\fB\-h\fR, \fB\-\-help
Display help text and exit.

.SH 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).
.SH "SEE ALSO"
.BR less (1),
.BR tail (1)
.SH AVAILABILITY
The tailf command is part of the util-linux package and is available from
ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/.