Just a few weeks until the 2021 JavaScript Full-Stack Bootcamp opens.
Signup to the waiting list!
The best use case of tail in my opinion is when called with the -f
option. It opens the file at the end, and watches for file changes. Any time there is new content in the file, it is printed in the window. This is great for watching log files, for example:
tail -f /var/log/system.log
To exit, press ctrl-C
.
You can print the last 10 lines in a file:
tail -n 10 <filename>
You can print the whole file content starting from a specific line using +
before the line number:
tail -n +10 <filename>
tail
can do much more and as always my advice is to check man tail
.
This command works on Linux, macOS, WSL, and anywhere you have a UNIX environment
Download my free Linux Commands Handbook
The 2021 JavaScript Full-Stack Bootcamp will start at the end of March 2021. Don't miss this opportunity, signup to the waiting list!
More cli tutorials:
- The Bash shell
- Introduction to Bash Shell Scripting
- The Fish Shell
- Shell, watch file content as it populates
- How to exit Vim
- UNIX Editors
- The UNIX Filesystem Commands
- Unix Shells Tutorial
- How to set an alias in a macOS or Linux shell
- A practical guide to Homebrew
- How to fix the xcrun invalid active developer path error in macOS
- The Command Line for Complete Beginners
- Introduction to Linux
- How to find the process that is using a port
- Linux commands: mkdir
- Linux commands: cd
- Linux commands: pwd
- Linux commands: rmdir
- Linux commands: ls
- Linux commands: mv
- Linux commands: cp
- Linux commands: less
- Linux commands: tail
- Linux commands: touch
- Linux commands: cat
- Linux commands: find
- Linux commands: ln
- Linux commands: ps
- Linux commands: echo
- Linux commands: top
- Linux commands: kill
- Linux commands: killall
- Linux commands: alias
- Linux commands: jobs
- Linux commands: bg
- Linux commands: fg
- Linux commands: type
- Linux commands: which
- Linux commands: whoami
- Linux commands: who
- Linux commands: clear
- Linux commands: su
- Linux commands: sudo
- Linux commands: chown
- Linux commands: chmod
- Linux commands: passwd
- Linux commands: open
- Linux commands: wc
- Linux commands: history
- Linux commands: du
- Linux commands: umask
- Linux commands: grep
- Linux commands: man
- Linux commands: uname
- Linux commands: sort
- Linux commands: uniq
- Linux commands: diff
- Linux commands: nohup
- Linux commands: df
- Linux commands: xargs
- Linux commands: gzip
- Linux commands: gunzip
- Linux commands: ping
- Linux commands: traceroute
- Linux commands: tar
- Linux commands: export
- Linux commands: crontab
- Linux commands: dirname
- Linux commands: basename
- Linux commands: printenv
- Linux commands: env
- A short guide to the ed editor
- A short guide to vim
- A short guide to emacs
- A short guide to nano
- Linux, no space left on device
- How to use Netcat
- How to use pm2 to serve a Node.js app