tail

NAME

tail – display the last part of a file

SYNOPSIS

tail [-F

-f

-r] [-q] [-b number

-c number

-n number] [file …]

DESCRIPTION

The tail utility displays the contents of file or, by default, its standard input, to the standard output.

The display begins at a byte, line or 512-byte block location in the input. Numbers having a leading plus (+') sign are relative to the beginning of the input, for example, -c +2'' starts the display at the second byte of the input. Numbers having a leading minus (-‘) sign or no explicit sign are relative to the end of the input, for example, -n 2'' displays the last two lines of the input. The default starting location is-n 10’’, or the last 10 lines of the input.

OPTIONS

• -f
  • The -f option causes tail to not stop when end of file is reached, but rather to wait for additional data to be appended to the input. The -f option is ignored if the standard input is a pipe, but not if it is a FIFO.
  • Now to start with the last 100 lines of server.log we use the following command.

tail -100f server.log