README


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 inotail - inotify enhanced tail
o===============================o

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.

Currently inotail is not fully compatible to neither POSIX or GNU tail but might
be in the future.

Requirements
------------
- Linux kernel 2.6.13 or higher with CONFIG_INOTIFY enabled
- Standard C Library (tested with GNU libc but might work with others too)
- GCC (other compilers might work but are not tested)

Building and installing inotail
-------------------------------
To build inotail:

	$ make

By default, inotail is installed to /usr/local/bin/, the manpage is installed to
/usr/local/share/man/. To install the inotail files to these locations:

	$ make install

To change these locations just set the prefix variable, e.g. to install the
inotail binary to /usr/ and the manpage to /usr/share/man/ respectively:

	$ make prefix=/usr install

License
-------
inotail is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2
or later. You can find the full text in the file LICENSE in the source tree of
inotail.

The files inotify.h and inotify-syscalls.h were taken from the source tree of
the Linux kernel and slightly altered. Both are licensed under the terms of the
GNU General Public License version 2.

-- Tobias Klauser <tklauser@distanz.ch>