inotail - inotify enhanced tail o===============================o inotail is a replacement for the 'tail' program found in the base installation of every Linux/UNIX system. It makes use of the inotify infrastructure in recent versions of the Linux kernel to speed up tailing files in the follow mode (the '-f' option). Standard tail polls the file every second by default while inotail listens to special events sent by the kernel through the inotify API to determine whether a file needs to be reread. Currently inotail is not fully compatible to neither POSIX or GNU tail but might be in the future. Requirements ------------ - Linux kernel 2.6.13 or higher with CONFIG_INOTIFY enabled - Standard C Library (tested with GNU libc but might work with others too) - GCC (other compilers might work but are not tested) Building and installing inotail ------------------------------- To build inotail type: $ make By default, inotail is installed to /usr/local/bin/, the manpage is installed to /usr/local/share/man/man1/. To install the inotail files to these locations type: $ make install To change these locations just set the prefix variable. E.g. to install the inotail binary to /usr/ and the manpage to /usr/share/man/ respectively type: $ make prefix=/usr install License ------- inotail is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 or later. You can find the full text in the file LICENSE in the source tree of inotail. The files inotify.h and inotify-syscalls.h were taken from the source tree of the Linux kernel and slightly altered. Both are licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2. -- Tobias Klauser <tklauser@distanz.ch>
