tailf - follow the growth of a log file
tailf [option] file
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)