tail: Cheat Sheet

Learn essential commands for viewing file endings, monitoring logs, and processing output streams with this quick reference guide. Perfect for system administrators and developers!

Tail is a command-line utility for reading the end of files. It is commonly used to monitor log files in real-time.

List last 10 lines of file

tail some.log

List last 50 lines of file

tail -50 some.log

List everything after top 10 lines of file

tail +10 some.log

List last 10 lines of file and monitor

tail -10f some.log

Ignore the first N lines of a file

This is useful when processing file with a header in which case N=2

tail -n+N FILE