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Ginger
Asked: 2017-01-06 14:01:39 +0800 CST

Tail the last 5 lines, over-writing the last 5 displayed lines when more are added?

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When using tail -f to display the last few lines of a file, how can I make it only ever display 5 lies, overwriting previous lines when the file is added to?

command-line

2 Answers

  1. Suppose you want to watch the file "file-to-be-watched", the following may do the trick:

    watch -n 1 tail -5 file-to-be-watched
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  2. Are you working at a text mode console, or for example via ssh from a desktop environment?

    I made a small demo with date which uses xterm.

    xterm -geometry 60x6 -e bash -c 'while true; do dat=$(date "+%H:%M:%S");echo "Hello $dat";echo "world $dat";echo "alias $dat";echo "blank $dat";echo "      $dat"; sleep 1;done'|tail -f

    You should be able to replace the while loop with your program, that prints lines every second

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