Developer's Daily | Unix by Example |
main | java | perl | unix | dev directory | web log |
tailf ? follow the growth of a log file |
tailf file |
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. |
An option could be provided to print out the last n lines instead of the last 10. |
This program was written by Rik Faith (faith@cs.unc.edu) and may be freely distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. There is ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY for this program. The current maintainer is Avery Pennarun (apenwarr@worldvisions.ca). |
syslogd(8), apmd(8) |