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 the given file and then wait
       for this 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.

       -n, --lines=number, -number
              Output the last number lines, instead of the last 10.

       -V, --version
              Display version information and exit.

       -h, --help
              Display help text and exit.


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).

SEE ALSO
       tail(1), less(1)

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



util-linux                         July 2014                          TAILF(1)
