README


1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42

 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 type:

	$ make

By default, inotail is installed to /usr/local/bin/, the manpage is installed to
/usr/local/share/man/man1/. To install the inotail files to these locations type:

	$ 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 type:

	$ 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.

-- Tobias Klauser <tklauser@distanz.ch>