70 lines
2.6 KiB
Groff
70 lines
2.6 KiB
Groff
.\" tailf.1 --
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.\" Created: Thu Jan 11 16:43:10 1996 by faith@acm.org
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.\" Copyright 1996, 2003 Rickard E. Faith (faith@acm.org)
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.\"
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.\" Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this
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.\" manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are
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.\" preserved on all copies.
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.\"
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.\" Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this
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.\" manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the
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.\" entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a
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.\" permission notice identical to this one.
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.\"
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.\" Since the Linux kernel and libraries are constantly changing, this
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.\" manual page may be incorrect or out-of-date. The author(s) assume no
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.\" responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from
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.\" the use of the information contained herein. The author(s) may not
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.\" have taken the same level of care in the production of this manual,
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.\" which is licensed free of charge, as they might when working
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.\" professionally.
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.\"
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.\" Formatted or processed versions of this manual, if unaccompanied by
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.\" the source, must acknowledge the copyright and authors of this work.
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.\"
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.TH TAILF 1 "February 2003" "util-linux" "User Commands"
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.SH NAME
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tailf \- follow the growth of a log file
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.SH SYNOPSIS
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.B tailf
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[\fIOPTION\fR] \fIfile\fR
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.SH DESCRIPTION
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.B tailf
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will print out the last 10 lines of a file and then wait for the file to
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grow. It is similar to
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.B tail -f
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but does not access the file when it is not growing. This has the side
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effect of not updating the access time for the file, so a filesystem flush
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does not occur periodically when no log activity is happening.
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.PP
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.B tailf
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is extremely useful for monitoring log files on a laptop when logging is
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infrequent and the user desires that the hard disk spin down to conserve
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battery life.
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.PP
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Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too.
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.TP
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\fB\-n\fR, \fB\-\-lines\fR=\fIN\fR, \fB\-N\fR
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output the last
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.I N
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lines, instead of the last 10.
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.TP
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\fB\-V\fR, \fB\-\-version
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Display version information and exit.
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.TP
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\fB\-h\fR, \fB\-\-help
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Display help text and exit.
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.SH AUTHOR
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This program was originally written by Rik Faith (faith@acm.org) and may be freely
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distributed under the terms of the X11/MIT License. There is ABSOLUTELY
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NO WARRANTY for this program.
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The latest inotify based implementation was written by Karel Zak (kzak@redhat.com).
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.SH "SEE ALSO"
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.BR tail (1),
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.BR less (1)
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.SH AVAILABILITY
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The tailf command is part of the util-linux package and is available from
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ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/.
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