Tail is a very import part of linux administrative tools. Apart from using it with a combination of script to achieve day to day goals “tail” can be used by itsef for some important administrative tasks. Observing live log files is one of those tasks. Tail by default only shows the last 10 lines of a file. In case of log file you can make it update “live” by using the “-f” extension. In linux systems by default all logs files are saved in “/var/log” to view a list of log files in this directory just type “ls -l /var/log/*.log”

In our example we will use the syslog file and observe it in real time by typing this: “tail -f /var/log/syslog”

Linux Commands/Tools