tailf

TAILF(1)                   Linux Programmer's Manual                  TAILF(1)



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 periodi‐
       cally 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.

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-ng package and is available
       from ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux-ng/.



                               13 February 2003                       TAILF(1)