TAILF(1)                                            Linux Programmer's Manual                                           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.

AUTHOR
       This program was originally written by Rik Faith (faithATacm.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 (kzakATredhat.com).

SEE ALSO
       tail(1), less(1)

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/.



                                                        13 February 2003                                                TAILF(1)