tail

Tail Command

The tail command in Linux is a utility used in text processing. Fundamentally, it’s used to output the last part of the files. The command reads data from standard input or from a file and outputs the last N bytes, lines, blocks, characters or words to the standard output (or a different file). By default, tail returns the last 10 lines of each file to the standard output. This command is common in situations where the user is interested in the most recent entries in a text file, such as log files.

Here is an example of tail command usage:

tail /var/log/syslog

In the above example, the tail command will print the last 10 lines of the /var/log/syslog file. This is particularly useful in checking the most recent system log entries.

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Tail Command