1TAILF(1)                   Linux Programmer's Manual                  TAILF(1)
2
3
4

NAME

6       tailf - follow the growth of a log file
7

SYNOPSIS

9       tailf [OPTION] file
10

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.
17
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.
21
22       Mandatory  arguments  to  long  options are mandatory for short options
23       too.
24
25       -n, --lines=N, -N
26              output the last N lines, instead of the last 10.
27

AUTHOR

29       This program was originally written by Rik  Faith  (faith@acm.org)  and
30       may  be  freely  distributed  under  the  terms of the X11/MIT License.
31       There is ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY for this program.
32
33       The latest inotify  based  implementation  was  written  by  Karel  Zak
34       (kzak@redhat.com).
35

SEE ALSO

37       tail(1), less(1)
38

AVAILABILITY

40       The tailf command is part of the util-linux-ng package and is available
41       from ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux-ng/.
42
43
44
45                               13 February 2003                       TAILF(1)