Description of problem: Not sure if this is a bug - may just be to deal with vague syntax, but to me, it seems like it should work. The following syntax used to work with tail: tail -5f /www/logs/access_log /www/logs/error_log now I get: tail: invalid option -- 5 I can still do either: tail -f /www/logs/access_log /www/logs/error_log (to tail both log files) or: tail -5f /www/logs/access_log (works with just one file) I'd think since the "-Nf" syntax works with one file, it should work with multiple files as well (tailing 5 lines of each). It does work if I do: "tail -f --lines=5 /www/logs/access_log /www/logs/error_log" Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): charlie-web1:$ rpm -qf `which tail` coreutils-5.97-6 charlie-web1:$ cat /etc/redhat-release Red Hat Enterprise Linux Client release 4.91 (Tikanga) How reproducible: Very Steps to Reproduce: see above
Thanks for the report. I can see how you'd think "tail -5f" should work for any number of arguments >= 1, but using a "-5" option (rather than "-n 5") puts your usage in GNU tail's "obsolete, maintain only bare minimum of support with legacy" mode. And legacy versions of tail-with-f only ever worked with a single file.
(In reply to comment #1) > And legacy versions of tail-with-f only ever worked with a single > file. Well it's always worked w/ RHEL3, and seems to also work with RHEL4 (see below). That syntax also works fine on FreeBSD's "tail", and with the version of tail distributed with Debian 3.1 (5.2.1-31). It seems very inconsistent that it now works when there is one file as an argument, but not with multiple files. I already updated the thing I had which called tail this way, so it's not a big deal to me if you want to close this... it's just kind of irritating. triton:$ tail -5f /www/logs/error_log /www/logs/access_log.1164153600 ==> /www/logs/error_log <== [ 5 more lines ] ==> /www/logs/access_log.1164153600 <== [ 5 more lines ] triton:$ rpm -qf `which tail` coreutils-4.5.3-28.4 triton:$ cat /etc/redhat-release Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS release 3 (Taroon Update 8) nahant64:$ sudo tail -5f /var/log/messages /var/log/mysqld.log ==> /var/log/messages <== [ 5 lines ] ==> /var/log/mysqld.log <== nahant64:$ rpm -qf `which tail` coreutils-5.2.1-31.4 nahant64:$ cat /etc/redhat-release Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS release 4 (Nahant Update 4)
'tail -n5 -f' is what you want to use. The 'tail -5' syntax has been deprecated for quite a while.