TAIL(1)              INTERACTIVE UNIX System              TAIL(1)



          NAME
               tail - display the last part of a file

          SYNOPSIS
               tail [ +[number][lbc[f] ] ] [ file ]

          DESCRIPTION
               The tail command copies the named file to the standard out-
               put beginning at a designated place.  If no file is named,
               the standard input is used.

               Copying begins at distance +number from the beginning or
               -number from the end of the input (if number is null, the
               value 10 is assumed).  Number is counted in units of lines,
               blocks, or characters, according to the appended option l,
               b, or c.  When no units are specified, counting is by lines.

               With the -f (``follow'') option, if the input file is not a
               pipe, the program will not terminate after the line of the
               input file has been copied, but will enter an endless loop,
               wherein it sleeps for a second and then attempts to read and
               copy further records from the input file.  Thus it may be
               used to monitor the growth of a file that is being written
               by some other process.  For example, the command:

                    tail -f fred

               will print the last ten lines of the file fred, followed by
               any lines that are appended to fred between the time tail is
               initiated and killed.  As another example, the command:

                    tail -15cf fred

               will print the last 15 characters of the file fred, followed
               by any lines that are appended to fred between the time tail
               is initiated and killed.

          SEE ALSO
               dd(1M).

          BUGS
               Tails relative to the end of the file are stored in a
               buffer, and thus are limited in length.  Various kinds of
               anomalous behavior may happen with character special files.

          WARNING
               The tail command will only tail the last 4096 bytes of a
               file regardless of its line count.







          Rev. Editing Package                                       Page 1