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TAILF(1)                         User Commands                        TAILF(1)

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 periodi-
       cally 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.
       -V, --version
              Output version information and exit.
       -h, --help
              Display help and exit.

AUTHOR
       This program was originally written by Rik  Faith  (faith AT 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 AT redhat.com).
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/.

util-linux                       February 2003                        TAILF(1)