inotail (1) Linux Manual Page
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