tailf (1)
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tailf.1 -- man page for tailf Copyright 1996, 2003 Rickard E. Faith (faith@acm.org) Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies. Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one. Si...
NAME
tailf - follow the growth of a log fileSYNOPSIS
tailf [option] fileDESCRIPTION
tailf is deprecated. It may have unfixed bugs and will be removed in March 2017. Nowadays it's safe to use tail -f (coreutils) in contrast to the original documentation below.tailf will print out the last 10 lines of the given file and then wait for this 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.
- -n, --lines=number, -number
- Output the last number lines, instead of the last 10.
- -V, --version
- Display version information and exit.
- -h
, --help- Display help text and exit.
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).