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 AT acm.org) and may be freely dis‐
       tributed 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 AT 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.ker‐
       nel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/.



util-linux                                  July 2014                                    TAILF(1)