Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

I have a file that gets a line added to the end of it frequently by a program. How can I get that last line into a line variable.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks.

..........first idea ..........


VAR="tail -1 <file>"


greetings Preßy

using VAR="tail -1 <file>" wont work as written. You should change the the quotes (") to back ticks (`) or use the syntax VAR=$(tail -1 <file>).

Can you elaborate a bit more on the problem you are trying to solve? If the program is running and appending lines, how will you know VAR contains the data you need? The program may have written lines to your file just after you set VAR to the last line.

UPS,.....
my fingers are faster then my brain... :-)

i'm sorry...

thx to google

greetings Preßy

Thanks for your conern...

I am going to write a script that checks the file time stamp and compares this to the current time. If the difference <= 5 minutes I will check the contents of the file. like the last 5-10 lines.

How to go about doing this in PHP, me thinks:

$fp = fopen("targetfile.txt", "r");
flock($fp, 1);

while(!feof($fp))
{
$tmp = fgets($fp);
}

flock($fp, 3);
fclose($fp);

after that has been looped, you can compare $tmp to the current time, which might look something like this:


if((time() - $tmp) > (5*60))
{
$fp = fopen("filetoberead.txt", "r");
flock($fp, 1);

while(!feof($fp))
{
$contents[] = fgets($fp);
}

flock($fp, 3);
fclose($fp);
}

....and then deal with the $contents array.