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Cover image for Living in the Shell #20; tail (Display/Follow File Content)
Babak K. Shandiz
Babak K. Shandiz

Posted on • Originally published at babakks.github.io on

Living in the Shell #20; tail (Display/Follow File Content)

tail

Display or follow file content.

ℹ️ Here, following means streaming a file while it's being updated (appended).

ℹ️ You can use -c in place of -n in the following examples, to switch to binary offset selection.

Print bottom N lines of a file -n

tail -n 5 ~/.bashrc
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Prints last 5 lines of ~/.bashrc

Print from N-th line afterwards -n +N

tail -n +3 ~/.bashrc
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Prints ~/.bashrc from the 3rd line until the end.

Following syslog events -f

tail -f /var/log/syslog
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Follows system logs (on Debian/Ubuntu).

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