TAIL(1)                                                   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).

     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.

     ORIGIN
          AT&T V.3




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