[laumars]

Generally you wouldn't want auto updating like the less +F or tail -f if the content you wanted was at the start of the file. However you can still work around those rare instances by specifying the -n flag. eg

    tail -n 2000 -f

The beauty of this is a file with less that 2000 files will be read in it's entirety, and you're gracefully managing larger files by cropping out the surplus data at the beginning.

And the best thing about this method is you can still pipe grep (which you couldn't do with less) so if you are writing out ~2000 lines rapidly enough that the content you want wouldn't be at the bottom, you can manage the text stream more efficiently (ie grep -v out stuff you don't want or only grep in the content you do want)

I should add that I am a fan of less on many occasions, but in this instance the piping ability of tail is a deal breaker when working with larger files.

[edwintorok]

Also searching with grep is a lot faster than searching with '/' in less when the file is really large.

[TallGuyShort]

Yes and grep isn't very good for interactive searching. There's lot of different ways you could do this, and they all have pros and cons depending on the situation. My point was that all these posts dismissing this blog post as pointless are just arrogant. Most people don't know about less +F, but it's pretty handy for some common use cases. So he didn't mention someone's favourite tool - it's okay.

[laumars]

At no point did I dismiss his post nor show any arrogance towards the author:

> Not that I'm trying to dismiss the effectiveness for +F for those inclined

> kudos to the author for his recommendation and providing helpful write ups to future sysadmins

The ironic thing is, you've been far more dismissive about other peoples suggestions than I had of the author's. As you said yourself, there are a lot different ways this can be done, so why limit us to discussing only one possible solution?

[TallGuyShort]

Fair enough. My apologies for how that was conveyed.