inotail

tail replacement using inotify

inotail is a replacement for the 'tail' program which is used to output the last portions of a file. It makes use of the inotify infrastructure in recent versions of the Linux kernel to speed up tailing files in the follow mode (the '-f' option). Ancient versions of tail poll the file every second by default while inotail (and tail from the GNU coreutils as of version 7.5) listens to special events sent by the kernel through the inotify API to determine whether a file needs to be reread.