1TAILF(1)                         User Commands                        TAILF(1)
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NAME

6       tailf - follow the growth of a log file
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SYNOPSIS

9       tailf [OPTION] file
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DESCRIPTION

12       tailf  will print out the last 10 lines of a file and then wait for the
13       file to grow.  It is similar to tail -f but does not  access  the  file
14       when  it  is not growing.  This has the side effect of not updating the
15       access time for the file, so a filesystem flush does not occur periodi‐
16       cally when no log activity is happening.
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18       tailf  is  extremely  useful  for monitoring log files on a laptop when
19       logging is infrequent and the user desires that the hard disk spin down
20       to conserve battery life.
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22       Mandatory  arguments  to  long  options are mandatory for short options
23       too.
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25       -n, --lines=N, -N
26              output the last N lines, instead of the last 10.
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28       -V, --version
29              Output version information and exit.
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31       -h, --help
32              Display help and exit.
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AUTHOR

36       This program was originally written by Rik  Faith  (faith@acm.org)  and
37       may  be  freely  distributed  under  the  terms of the X11/MIT License.
38       There is ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY for this program.
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40       The latest inotify  based  implementation  was  written  by  Karel  Zak
41       (kzak@redhat.com).
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SEE ALSO

44       tail(1), less(1)
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AVAILABILITY

47       The  tailf  command  is part of the util-linux package and is available
48       from ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/.
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52util-linux                       February 2003                        TAILF(1)