How to Use Tail Command in Linux with Examples

As Linux users, we often work with long-running background Linux processes, which are called daemons or services. Some of the common examples of the services are Secure Shell (sshd), Network Manager (networkd), Volume Manager (LVM), Cron, and the list goes on.

Many times we need to monitor the logs of these services to debug the system issues. However, one of the main challenges is that these services generate a lot of logs and most of the time going through these logs makes it cumbersome, this is where we can use the tail command.

tail command is a command-line utility, similar to the head command that reads a file and prints the last 10 lines (content) of one or more files to standard output.

In this practical guide, we will learn about the tail command. By the end of this guide, Linux command-line users will be able to use the tail command effectively.

Table of Contents

The syntax of the tail command is similar to other Linux commands:

By default, the tail command prints the last 10 lines of the given file as shown.

Here, we can see that the above command shows the last ten lines from the /var/log/secure file.

In the last example, the command prints the last 10 lines of the given file. However, we can use the -n option which allows us to limit the number of lines to be printed on the screen as shown.

In this example, we can see that now the command shows the last three lines only instead of the ten lines.

Here, we can use the plus (+) symbol with the -n option, which allows us to control the starting point from the given file.

To understand this, let鈥檚 use the +5 value to start the output from the 5th line:

Similar to lines, we can also use the command to display the last N characters of the file using the -c option as shown below:

In this example, we can see that the command shows the last seven ASCII characters of the given file.

Similarly, we can use the plus symbol (+) with the -c option to skip the first N character. So let鈥檚 skip the first line of the file using the below command:

Here, we can see that the command shows all the lines except the first line.

We can instruct the tail command to display the current file name as a display header, which comes in handy while working with multiple files.

So, let鈥檚 use the -v option to enable the display header:

Here, we can see that the command is waiting infinitely after displaying the last ten lines:

Next, let鈥檚 open another terminal and append some text to the numbers-2.txt file:

Now, let’s switch to the first terminal to view the newly added text:

Here, we can see that the tail command shows the newly added text.

Do you know of any other best example of the tail command in Linux? Let us know your views in the comments below.

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