| .\" tailf.1 -- |
| .\" Created: Thu Jan 11 16:43:10 1996 by faith@acm.org |
| .\" 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. |
| .\" |
| .\" Since the Linux kernel and libraries are constantly changing, this |
| .\" manual page may be incorrect or out-of-date. The author(s) assume no |
| .\" responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from |
| .\" the use of the information contained herein. The author(s) may not |
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| .\" which is licensed free of charge, as they might when working |
| .\" professionally. |
| .\" |
| .\" Formatted or processed versions of this manual, if unaccompanied by |
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| .\" |
| .TH TAILF 1 "13 February 2003" "" "Linux Programmer's Manual" |
| .SH NAME |
| tailf \- follow the growth of a log file |
| .SH SYNOPSIS |
| .B tailf |
| [\fIOPTION\fR] \fIfile\fR |
| .SH DESCRIPTION |
| .B tailf |
| will print out the last 10 lines of a file and then wait for the file to |
| grow. It is similar to |
| .B 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. |
| .PP |
| .B 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. |
| .PP |
| Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too. |
| .TP |
| \fB\-n\fR, \fB\-\-lines\fR=\fIN\fR, \fB\-N\fR |
| output the last |
| .I N |
| lines, instead of the last 10. |
| .SH 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). |
| .SH "SEE ALSO" |
| .BR tail "(1), " less "(1)" |
| .SH AVAILABILITY |
| The tailf command is part of the util-linux-ng package and is available from |
| ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux-ng/. |
