tailf(1) - Linux man page

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 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 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.

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).

Availability