From the tail(1) man page: With --follow (-f), tail defaults to following the file descriptor, which means that even if a tail’ed file is renamed, tail will continue to track its end. This default behavior is not desirable …

Say I have a huge text file (>2GB) and I just want to cat the lines X to Y (e.g. 57890000 to 57890010). From what I understand I can do this by piping head into tail or viceversa, i.e. head -A /...

Tail will then listen for changes to that file. If you remove the file, and create a new one with the same name the filename will be the same but it's a different inode (and probably stored on a different place …

The problem is that tail program buffers its input file until it get a eof condition, then it prints out the last lines (10 by default). Most likely you are interrupting it with ctrl-c combination that terminates it, thus …

The command cat -n [filename] | tail will get a quick count and display of the most recent records if that's what you're looking for. The -f switch makes it persistent until escape - which really doesn't sound …

Is it possible to do a tail -f (or similar) on a file, and grep it at the same time? I wouldn't mind other commands just looking for that kind of behavior.

tail will show you the first 20 lines, and then carry on displaying all new lines being added as they come (whether they come in batch of 1, 20 or 1000 lines). Or in other words, tail -fn20 is like tail -n20 …

Jan 30, 2014 · I'd like to be able to tail the output of a server log file that has messages like: INFO SEVERE etc, and if it's SEVERE, show the line in red; if it's INFO, in green. What kind of alias can I …

How to use tail -f with grep to show surrounding lines Ask Question Asked 13 years, 2 months ago Modified 9 years, 8 months ago

The point is that tail -f file1 file2 doesn't work on AIX where tail accepts only one filename. You can do (tail -f file1 & tail -f file2) | process to redirect the stdout of both tail s to the pipe to process.