text-utils/tailf.1

   1 .\" tailf.1 --
   2 .\" Created: Thu Jan 11 16:43:10 1996 by faith@acm.org
   3 .\" Copyright 1996, 2003 Rickard E. Faith (faith@acm.org)
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  25 .TH TAILF 1 "13 February 2003" "" "Linux Programmer's Manual"
  26 .SH NAME
  27 tailf \- follow the growth of a log file
  28 .SH SYNOPSIS
  29 .B tailf
  30 [\fIOPTION\fR] \fIfile\fR
  31 .SH DESCRIPTION
  32 .B tailf
  33 will print out the last 10 lines of a file and then wait for the file to
  34 grow.  It is similar to
  35 .B tail -f
  36 but does not access the file when it is not growing.  This has the side
  37 effect of not updating the access time for the file, so a filesystem flush
  38 does not occur periodically when no log activity is happening.
  39 .PP
  40 .B tailf
  41 is extremely useful for monitoring log files on a laptop when logging is
  42 infrequent and the user desires that the hard disk spin down to conserve
  43 battery life.
  44 .PP
  45 Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too.
  46 .TP
  47 \fB\-n\fR, \fB\-\-lines\fR=\fIN\fR, \fB\-N\fR
  48 output the last
  49 .I N
  50 lines, instead of the last 10.
  51 .SH AUTHOR
  52 This program was originally written by Rik Faith (faith@acm.org) and may be freely
  53 distributed under the terms of the X11/MIT License.  There is ABSOLUTELY
  54 NO WARRANTY for this program.
  55
  56 The latest inotify based implementation was written by Karel Zak (kzak@redhat.com).
  57 .SH "SEE ALSO"
  58 .BR tail "(1), " less "(1)"
  59 .SH AVAILABILITY
  60 The tailf command is part of the util-linux-ng package and is available from
  61 ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux-ng/.