NAME

       tailf - follow the growth of a log file

SYNOPSIS

       tailf [option] file

DESCRIPTION

       tailf is deprecated.  It may have unfixed bugs and will be removed in March 2017. Nowadays
       it's safe to use tail -f (coreutils) in contrast to the original documentation below.

       tailf will print out the last 10 lines of the given file and then wait for  this  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.

       -n, --lines=number, -number
              Output the last number lines, instead of the last 10.

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

       -h, --help
              Display help text 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/.