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)