man pages section 1: User Commands

tailf (1)

Name

tailf - follow the growth of a log file

Synopsis

tailf [OPTION] file

Description

TAILF(1)                         User Commands                        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.

       -V, --version
              Display version information and exit.

       -h, --help
              Display help text 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).


ATTRIBUTES
       See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:


       +---------------+---------------------+
       |ATTRIBUTE TYPE |  ATTRIBUTE VALUE    |
       +---------------+---------------------+
       |Availability   | text/text-utilities |
       +---------------+---------------------+
       |Stability      | Uncommitted         |
       +---------------+---------------------+
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/.



NOTES
       This    software    was    built    from    source     available     at
       https://java.net/projects/solaris-userland.    The  original  community
       source       was        downloaded        from         https://www.ker-
       nel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/v2.24/util-linux-2.24.2.tar.xz

       Further information about this software can be found on the open source
       community website at https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux.



util-linux                       February 2003                        TAILF(1)