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 periodiā
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@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).
SEE ALSOtail(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)