NAME¶
inotail - A fast and lightweight version of tail using inotify
SYNOPSIS¶
inotail [OPTION]... [FILE]...
DESCRIPTION¶
inotail is a replacement for the 'tail' program found in the base
installation of every Linux/UNIX system. It makes use of the inotify
infrastructure in recent versions of the Linux kernel to speed up tailing
files in the follow mode (the '-f' option). Standard tail polls the file every
second by default while inotail listens to special events sent by the kernel
through the inotify API to determine whether a file needs to be reread.
Note: inotail will not work on systems running a kernel without
inotify. To enable inotify, please set CONFIG_INOTIFY=y in your Linux kernel
configuration and recompile it.
Currently inotail is not fully compatible to neither POSIX or GNU tail but might
be in the future.
OPTIONS¶
- -c N, --bytes=N
- output the last N bytes. If the first character of N is a
'+', begin printing with the Nth character from the start of each
file.
- -f, --follow
- keep the file(s) open and print appended data as the file
grows
- -n N, --lines=N
- output the last N lines (default: 10) If the first
character of N is a '+', begin printing with the Nth line from the start
of each file.
- -v, --verbose
- print headers with file names
- -h, --help
- show help and exit
- -V, --version
- show inotail version and exit
AUTHOR¶
Written by Tobias Klauser <tklauser@distanz.ch>
SEE ALSO¶
tail(1), inotify(7)