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becko
Asked: 2014-10-17 05:28:33 +0800 CST

Text file viewer that automatically refreshes when file changes? [duplicate]

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I have a text-file that is being continually written to by another program. gedit can refresh the text file contents by going to File -> Revert, but this requires manual input. Is there a text-file viewer (doesn't have to be GUI, a terminal viewer works fine) that automatically updates the contents of the file without manual input?

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1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    If your text-file grows with new content append to it, you could use tail to track changes.

    It could be achieved with tail -f text-file or tailf text-file

    If you want to print the content in it from very beginning (or from certain line):

    tail -n +1 -f text-file

    "-n +1" for starting from the first line of it, more detailed explaination could be found in man tail:

    -n, --lines=K
    output the last K lines, instead of the last 10; or use -n +K to output lines starting with the Kth

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