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[dupe] Stop using tail -f (mostly) (brianstorti.com)
15 points by antouank on June 6, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 6 comments




Tried this for a while the last time I saw this posted somewhere, but went back to using tail.

Using less +F you're not able to add blank lines to the terminal. Seems kind of silly, but it's very useful to see if there has been any output since last time you took a look.


This is exactly the reason I've never switched to using `less +F`, as well. When I tail a log, I'm usually looking for sections of it corresponding to particular test runs. Adding blank lines or even rows of dashes/equal signs lets me make the distinction clearly visible.


Same here. I'm normally using "tail -f | grep something" which less +f doesn't seem to handle.


If file is very large like several gigabytes, `tail` is much faster than `less`


I'm still going to use tail -f, in tmux. I get the log stream, and I get tmux's search & movement.




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