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  peri-
       odically 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 (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							   February 2003							  TAILF(1)