tailf — follow the growth of a log file
tailf [option] file
tailf is deprecated. It may have unfixed bugs and will be removed from util-linux in March 2017. Nowadays it's safe to use tail -f (from coreutils), in contrast to what the original documentation below says.
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 wishes the hard disk to spin down to conserve battery life.
−n,
−−lines=number, −numberOutput the last number lines, instead of the last 10.
−V, −−versionDisplay version information and exit.
−h, −−helpDisplay help text and exit.
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).
The tailf command is part of the util-linux package and is available from ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/.
|
tailf.1 -- man page for tailf Copyright 1996, 2003 Rickard E. Faith (faithacm.org) Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies. Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one. Since the Linux kernel and libraries are constantly changing, this manual page may be incorrect or out-of-date. The author(s) assume no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein. The author(s) may not have taken the same level of care in the production of this manual, which is licensed free of charge, as they might when working professionally. Formatted or processed versions of this manual, if unaccompanied by the source, must acknowledge the copyright and authors of this work. |