'\" t .\" ** The above line should force tbl to be a preprocessor ** .\" Man page for inotail .\" .\" Copyright (c) 2006-2009 Tobias Klauser .\" .\" You may distribute under the terms of the GNU General Public .\" License as specified in the file COPYING that comes with .\" inotail. .pc .TH INOTAIL 1 "2009-01-25" "" "Inotify enhanced tail" .SH NAME inotail \- A fast and lightweight version of tail using inotify .SH SYNOPSIS .B inotail [OPTION]... [FILE]... .SH DESCRIPTION .B 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. \fINote:\fR 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. .PP Currently inotail is not fully compatible to neither POSIX or GNU tail but might be in the future. .SH OPTIONS .TP .B \-c \fIN\fR, \fB\-\-bytes\fR=\fIN 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. .TP .B \-f\fR, \fB\-\-follow keep the file(s) open and print appended data as the file grows .TP .B \-n \fIN\fR, \fB\-\-lines\fR=\fIN 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. .TP .B \-q\fR, \fB\-\-quiet\fR, \fB\-\-silent never print headers with file names .TP .B \-v\fR, \fB\-\-verbose alway print headers with file names .TP .B \-h\fR, \fB\-\-help show help and exit .TP .B \-V\fR, \fB\-\-version show inotail version and exit .SH AUTHOR .PP Written by Tobias Klauser .SH SEE ALSO .PP .BR tail(1), .BR head(1), .BR inotify(7)