NAME
inotail - A fast and lightweight version of tail using inotify
SYNOPSIS
inotail [OPTION]... [FILE]...
DESCRIPTION
inotail is a replacement for the ’tail’ program found in the base
installation of every Linux/UNIX system. It makes use of the inotify
infrastructure in recent versions of the Linux kernel to speed up
tailing files in the follow mode (the ’-f’ option). Standard tail polls
the file every second by default while inotail listens to special
events sent by the kernel through the inotify API to determine whether
a file needs to be reread. Note: inotail will not work on systems
running a kernel without inotify. To enable inotify, please set
CONFIG_INOTIFY=y in your Linux kernel configuration and recompile it.
Currently inotail is not fully compatible to neither POSIX or GNU tail
but might be in the future.
OPTIONS
-c N, --bytes=N
output the last N bytes. If the first character of N is a ’+’,
begin printing with the Nth character from the start of each
file.
-f, --follow
keep the file(s) open and print appended data as the file grows
-n N, --lines=N
output the last N lines (default: 10) If the first character of
N is a ’+’, begin printing with the Nth line from the start of
each file.
-v, --verbose
print headers with file names
-h, --help
show help and exit
-V, --version
show inotail version and exit
AUTHOR
Written by Tobias Klauser <tklauser@distanz.ch>
SEE ALSO
tail(1), inotify(7)
2006-08-13