Unix commands - tail

The "tail" command is a function I use multiple times during a day. You use this command to get contents from a file. I often use it to get the last 10 entries in a log file.

To get the 10 last lines, you do this:

tail error.log

If you want to get the last 50 lines, you can add a parameter like this:

tail -n 50 error.log

But an equal important usage of "tail" is that you can "follow" the end of the file. Let say that you want to check the outputs of a log file when you open a website.

tail -f error.log

To achieve this, you add the "-f" parameter. Doing this, all the contents that comes into the file will be outputted to the screen until you stop the process.