TAIL(1)

✨ TAIL(1) — the tail girlie ✨

okay so bestie, we're in the General Commands Manual section and today's main character is tail 💅 she shows you the end of things. iconic behaviour honestly.

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🎀 NAME 🎀

tail — Print the last 10 lines of each FILE to standard output. With more than one FILE, precede each with a header giving the file name. With no FILE, or when FILE is -, read standard input.

also real quick, mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too. no cap. 🫶

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

tail [OPTION]... [FILE]...

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

Print the last 10 lines of each FILE to standard output. With more than one FILE, precede each with a header giving the file name. With no FILE, or when FILE is -, read standard input.

and like, repeat after me: mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too ✨ that's the whole vibe.

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👑 OPTIONS 👑

• -c, --bytes — Number of bytes to print
• -f, --follow — Print the file as it grows Possible values:
  • descriptor
  • name
• -n, --lines — Number of lines to print
• --pid <PID> — With -f, terminate after process ID, PID dies
• -q, --quiet — Never output headers giving file names
• -s, --sleep-interval <N> — Number of seconds to sleep between polling the file when running with -f
• --max-unchanged-stats <N> — Reopen a FILE which has not changed size after N (default 5) iterations to see if it has been unlinked or renamed (this is the usual case of rotated log files); This option is meaningful only when polling (i.e., with --use-polling) and when --follow=name
• -v, --verbose — Always output headers giving file names
• -z, --zero-terminated — Line delimiter is NUL, not newline
• --use-polling — Disable 'inotify' support and use polling instead
• --retry — Keep trying to open a file if it is inaccessible
• -F — Same as --follow=name --retry
• --debug — indicate which --follow implementation is used
• -h, --help — Print help
• -V, --version — Print version
• [files] — the files, bestie 🍓

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💜 VERSION 💜

v(uutils coreutils) 0.12.0

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🌈 EXAMPLES 🌈

Show last 10 lines in a file:

tail path/to/file

Show last 10 lines of multiple files:

tail path/to/file1 path/to/file2 ...

Show last 5 lines in file:

tail [-5|--lines 5] path/to/file

Print a file from a specific line number:

tail [-n|--lines] +count path/to/file

Print a specific count of bytes from the end of a given file:

tail [-c|--bytes] count path/to/file

Print the last lines of a given file and keep reading it until <Ctrl c>:

tail [-f|--follow] path/to/file

Keep reading file until <Ctrl c>, even if the file is inaccessible:

tail [-F|--retry --follow] path/to/file

Show last count lines in a file and refresh every seconds seconds:

tail [-n|--lines] count [-s|--sleep-interval] seconds [-f|--follow]
path/to/file

The examples are provided by the tldr-pages project <https://tldr.sh> under the CC BY 4.0 License. Please note that, as uutils is a work in progress, some examples might fail. 😭 fr fr, be gentle with her.

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and that's the whole thing bestie 💖 this page is from the uutils coreutils, v(uutils coreutils) 0.12.0, dated 2026-09-25 — go forth and tail ur logs, mwah 🧚✨👑