Christian Roy

Paul Reinheimer wrote an article on a bug he was trying to solve.

He wrote:

Something I would love to have: An application that watched a file on disk, reporting all versions of the file over time. tail -f wont work as the file is a single line long, the line is changed but no new lines are added. I'm aware of similar tools for windows, none for mac/linux.

If you want to watch the last lines of a file to see when it changes, try this in linux:

Every 2 seconds, it will run tail on your file and display you the last 10 lines.
DO NOT use the "tail -f" when using watch.

If the last line changed, you will see it appear in the next 2 seconds.

If you want to watch only line 30:

The watch utility seem to be installed by default on distribution like ubuntu and Suse.

PS: I tried posting this as a comment on Paul's blog but it told me:

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