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 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.
BUGS
An option could be provided to print out the last
n lines instead of the last
10.
AUTHOR
This program was 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.
tailf.1 --
Created: Thu Jan 11 16:43:10 1996 by faith@acm.org
Copyright 1996, 2003 Rickard E. Faith (faith@acm.org)
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