text-utils/tailf.1

   1 .\" tailf.1 -- man page for tailf
   2 .\" Copyright 1996, 2003 Rickard E. Faith (faith@acm.org)
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  24 .TH TAILF 1 "March 2015" "util-linux" "User Commands"
  25 .SH NAME
  26 tailf \- follow the growth of a log file
  27 .SH SYNOPSIS
  28 .B tailf
  29 [option]
  30 .I file
  31 .SH DESCRIPTION
  32 .B tailf is deprecated.
  33 It may have unfixed bugs and will be removed from util-linux in March 2017.
  34 Nowadays it's safe to use
  35 .B tail -f
  36 (from coreutils), in contrast to what the original documentation below says.
  37 .PP
  38 .B tailf
  39 will print out the last 10 lines of the given \fIfile\fR and then wait
  40 for this \fIfile\fR to grow.  It is similar to
  41 .B tail -f
  42 but does not access the file when it is not growing.  This has the side
  43 effect of not updating the access time for the file, so a filesystem flush
  44 does not occur periodically when no log activity is happening.
  45 .PP
  46 .B tailf
  47 is extremely useful for monitoring log files on a laptop when logging is
  48 infrequent and the user wishes the hard disk to spin down to conserve
  49 battery life.
  50 .TP
  51 .BR \-n , " -\-lines=\fInumber\fR" , " \-\fInumber\fR"
  52 Output the last
  53 .I number
  54 lines, instead of the last 10.
  55 .TP
  56 \fB\-V\fR, \fB\-\-version
  57 Display version information and exit.
  58 .TP
  59 \fB\-h\fR, \fB\-\-help
  60 Display help text and exit.
  61
  62 .SH AUTHOR
  63 This program was originally written by Rik Faith (faith@acm.org) and may be freely
  64 distributed under the terms of the X11/MIT License.  There is ABSOLUTELY
  65 NO WARRANTY for this program.
  66
  67 The latest inotify-based implementation was written by Karel Zak (kzak@redhat.com).
  68 .SH "SEE ALSO"
  69 .BR less (1),
  70 .BR tail (1)
  71 .SH AVAILABILITY
  72 The tailf command is part of the util-linux package and is available from
  73 ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/.