NAME

       tailf - follow the growth of a log file

SYNOPSIS

       tailf [OPTION] file

DESCRIPTION

       tailf  will  print out the last 10 lines of a file and then wait for the file to grow.  It
       is similar to tail -f but does not access the file when it is not growing.  This  has  the
       side  effect  of not updating the access time for the file, so a filesystem flush does not
       occur periodically when no log activity is happening.

       tailf is extremely useful for monitoring log files on a laptop when logging is  infrequent
       and the user desires that the hard disk spin down to conserve battery life.

       Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too.

       -n, --lines=N, -N
              output the last N lines, instead of the last 10.

       -V, --version
              Output version information and exit.

       -h, --help
              Display help and exit.

AUTHOR

       This  program  was  originally  written  by  Rik  Faith  (faith@acm.org) and may be freely
       distributed under the terms of the X11/MIT License.  There is ABSOLUTELY NO  WARRANTY  for
       this program.

       The latest inotify based implementation was written by Karel Zak (kzak@redhat.com).

SEE ALSO

       tail(1), less(1)

AVAILABILITY

       The   tailf   command   is   part   of  the  util-linux  package  and  is  available  from
       ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/.