Tail Command in Linux: A Comprehensive Overview

The tail in Linux is handy command. You can check the last lines of a file in Linux/Unix operating systems.

You can use it to display last lines from single file, display last lines from multiple files, display the last entries of log files.

Tail Command in Linux

During production support the usage of Tail command is helpful since you can check latest logs quickly. Here are the top Tail command examples.

#1 Display last lines in a file (Tail file Linux)

Here's the tail command that shows last three lines of a file.

cat sample.txt | tail -3

It displays last 3 lines of a file. The same command you can use as

tail -3 sample.txt

#2 Display last lines of multiple files

There are three files. sample2.txt, sample3.txt, sample4.txt. The command displays the last 3 lines from all the three files.

tail -3 sample[2-4].txt

#3 Tail -f option (Tail f Linux)

The –f option is to check status of long-running process that is redirecting output to a file. For example, if you invoke the below command, the status it writes to the output.

find . -print |xargs grep -i abc </tmp/abc &

Using the -f option you can see contents of the file /tmp/abc whenever it is updated: 

tail -f /tmp/abc

Related

• Linux Command Lines and Shell Scripting
  

References

• Linux commands for beginners