tail -f equivalent

Question

I am seeing a delay of several seconds with the tail command. I found the cause for it has something to do with nfs services. I am using Arch linux and yet to find out how to disable all these services.

I have searched and had some indication that other tools will not be affected such as cat so what can give equivalent results to tail -f?

score 7 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 30 '11 at 20:56

7

Functionally equivalents to tail -f are

less +F

and where available

tailf

answered Sep 30 '11 at 20:56

enzotib

51,661

Thanks for telling about less +F. Seems very helpful when used with screen. – rozcietrzewiacz Sep 30 '11 at 22:18
thank, those are the same results however delay remains. My resolution seems to be to remove nfs – veccy Sep 30 '11 at 22:37
Also worth mentioning how to stop and start the following - this answer sums it up well. – Steve Chambers Apr 07 '17 at 14:53
According to https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/52159 tailf is deprecated on arch? – user202729 Oct 19 '21 at 15:55

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 01 '11 at 00:43

The delay is likely due to buffering of the data.

tail (from the man page) checks for updates every second (changeable with '-s' or '--sleep-interval'), which can cause a perceptible delay.

tailf accesses files without causing a corresponding atime update (access time), which could introduce delays.

And less... as always, less is more!

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Apr 12 '22 at 14:02

tail -F: same as -f with --retry. Even better than tailf since it works without re-launching the command if the file disappears. Example output:

tail: 'some-log-file.log' has become inaccessible: No such file or directory
tail: 'some-log-file.log' has appeared;  following new file

tail -f equivalent

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