HP-UX Reference (11i v3 07/02) - 1 User Commands N-Z (vol 2)

tail(1) tail(1)

EXTERNAL INFLUENCES

Environment Variables

LC_CTYPE determines the locale for the interpretation of sequences of bytes of text data as characters

(e.g., single- versus multibyte characters in arguments and input ﬁles).

LC_MESSAGES determines the language in which messages are displayed.

If LC_CTYPE or LC_MESSAGES is not speciﬁed in the environment or is set to the empty string, the

value of LANG is used as a default for each unspeciﬁed or empty variable. If

LANG is not speciﬁed or is

set to the empty string, a default of "C" (see lang(5)) is used instead of

LANG.

If any internationalization variable contains an invalid setting,

tail behaves as if all internationalization

variables are set to "C". See environ(5).

International Code Set Support

Single- and multi-byte character code sets are supported. However, the

b and c options can break multi-

byte characters and should be used with caution in a multi-byte locale environment.

EXAMPLES

Print the last three lines in ﬁle

file1 to the standard output, and leave

tail in ‘‘follow’’ mode:

tail -fn 3 file1

tail -3 -f file1

Print the last 15 bytes of ﬁle logfile followed by any lines that are appended to

logfile after tail

is initiated until it is killed:

tail -fc15 logfile

tail -f -c 15 logfile

Three ways to print an entire ﬁle:

tail -b +1 file

tail -c +1 file

tail -n +1 file

WARNINGS

Various kinds of anomalous behavior may occur with character special ﬁles. For piped output,

tail is lim-

ited in its output and depends on process limits.