Living in the Shell 20; tail (Display/Follow File Content)

tail

Display or follow file content.

Here, following means streaming a file while it's being updated (appended).

You can use -c in place of -n in the following examples, to switch to binary offset selection.

Print bottom N lines of a file -n

tail -n 5 ~/.bashrc

Prints last 5 lines of ~/.bashrc

Print from N-th line afterwards -n +N

tail -n +3 ~/.bashrc

Prints ~/.bashrc from the 3rd line until the end.

Following syslog events -f

tail -f /var/log/syslog

Follows system logs (on Debian/Ubuntu).