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Updated: Wednesday, July 27, 2022
 
 

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 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, -number
              Output the last number 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(7) 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
       Source  code  for open source software components in Oracle Solaris can
       be found at https://www.oracle.com/downloads/opensource/solaris-source-
       code-downloads.html.

       This     software     was    built    from    source    available    at
       https://github.com/oracle/solaris-userland.   The  original   community
       source        was        downloaded        from        https://www.ker-
       nel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/v2.29/util-linux-2.29.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                        March 2015                          TAILF(1)