I'm viewing a log file with "tail -f" using GNOME Terminal. The log has a lot of input constantly coming into it, and what I find happens is that I scroll up to a previous section, and I'm reading it, and then the screen goes black, or gets replaced with text which is further down the file.
I don't know if this is the problem, but it's as if tail can only hold so many lines in memory, and when a certain number come in after the ones I'm reading, it deletes the ones I'm reading.
The number of subsequent lines which need to come in to make this happen isn't too huge - about 600 (~55,000 bytes) lines in an experiment I just did. I'd like to increase this to about 20,000 lines (or 1,000,000 bytes, say, if it's counted in bytes). Can anyone tell me how to do this? thanks
PS - someone reading this might be tempted to say "this isn't what tail -f
is for, it's just for reading the end of files". I like to have the best of both worlds - to press "Enter" to get to the end of the file and see what's happening now, but also to be able to scroll up and see what happened previously.
tail -f
just writes to standard output. The terminal probably has a "scrollback size" setting, but you'll need to say what it is for someone to be able to tell you where to find it. – Michael Homer Apr 13 '15 at 09:23