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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 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.

       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 ([email protected]) 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 ([email protected]).

SEE ALSO
       tail(1), less(1)

AVAILABILITY
       The   tailf   command   is   part   of   the   util-linux   package   and  is  available  from  ftp://ftp.ker‐
       nel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/.



util-linux                                          February 2003                                            TAILF(1)