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.
- -n, --lines=N, -N
- output the last N lines, instead of the last
10.
- -V, --version
- Output version information and exit.
- -h, --help
- 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/.