tail is a program available on Unix, Unix-like systems, FreeDOS and MSX-DOS used to display the tail end of a text file or piped data. Implementations The version of tail bundled in GNU coreutils was written by Paul Rubin, David MacKenzie, Ian Lance Taylor, and Jim Meyering. The command is available as a separate package for Microsoft Windows as part of the UnxUtils collection of native Win32 ports of common GNU Unix-like utilities. The FreeDOS version was developed by M. Aitchison. A tail command is also part of ASCII's MSX-DOS2 Tools for MSX-DOS version 2. CCZE is tail-like while displaying its output in color. pctail is similar to CCZE. It is a colorized tail programmed in Python which tails and colorizes syslog output. Inotail is a deprecated implementation of inotify kernel interface. The early implementation of tail polled every second to see if new data can be displayed, as tail implemented inotifiy kernel interface Inotail become deprecated and it is not longer maintained. Inotail used the Linux kernel's inotify-interface introduced in version 2.6.13 in August 2005 so that it only checks for new data when there really is some. MultiTail not only displays logfiles in colors, it can also merge, filter, scrollback and split a terminal window into subwindows. It is more or less a combination of tail, sed, watch, CCZE/pctail, grep, diff, Beeper and others. Syntax The command-syntax is: tail [options] <filename> By default, will output the last 10 lines of its input to the standard output. With command line options, the amount of output and the units (lines, blocks or bytes) may be changed. In the following example only the last line of the reports is output: $ tail -n1 report-13* ==> report-1301 <== Total tons output for month of January '13 was 523 ==> report-1302 <== Total tons output for month of February '13 was 272 ==> report-1303 <== Total tons output for month of March '13 was 623 This example outputs the last 4 characters of the reports, silently suppressing the filenames. Notice that the count includes the newline character at the end of each line and so the output does not include a leading space one might expect. $ tail --silent -c4 report* 523 272 623 This example shows all lines of report from the second line onwards: tail -n +2 report Using an older syntax (still used in older version of Sun Solaris as