TAIL(1) (Directory and File Management Utilities) TAIL(1)
NAME
tail - deliver the last part of a file
SYNOPSIS
tail [ +[number][lbc[f] ] ] [ file ]
DESCRIPTION
tail copies the named file to the standard output beginning
at a designated place. If no file is named, the standard
input is used.
Copying begins at distance +number from the beginning, or
-number from the end of the input (if number is null, the
value 10 is assumed). Number is counted in units of lines,
blocks, or characters, according to the appended option l,
b, or c. When no units are specified, counting is by lines.
With the -f (``follow'') option, if the input file is not a
pipe, the program will not terminate after the line of the
input file has been copied, but will enter an endless loop,
wherein it sleeps for a second and then attempts to read and
copy further records from the input file. Thus it may be
used to monitor the growth of a file that is being written
by some other process. For example, the command:
tail -f fred
will print the last ten lines of the file fred, followed by
any lines that are appended to fred between the time tail is
initiated and killed. As another example, the command:
tail -15cf fred
will print the last 15 characters of the file fred, followed
by any lines that are appended to fred between the time tail
is initiated and killed.
SEE ALSO
dd(1M).
Page 1 May 1989
TAIL(1) (Directory and File Management Utilities) TAIL(1)
BUGS
Tails relative to the end of the file are stored in a
buffer, and thus are limited in length. Various kinds of
anomalous behavior may happen with character special files.
WARNING
The tail command will only tail the last 4096 bytes of a
file regardless of its line count.
Page 2 May 1989