NAME
tailf - follow the growth of a log file
SYNOPSIS
tailf 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.
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.
SEE ALSO
tail(1),
less(1)