I love to press enter a few times to add a few empty lines to serve as a marker. Plus, I set my terminal scrollback buffer to 10000 lines (not a problem nowadays), so cmd-F in the terminal works pretty well. And I prefer the natural/kinetic scrolling of the terminal backlog to less as a fullscreen tty program.

Finally, as the article alludes to, tail can monitor multiple files at once.

> I love to press enter a few times to add a few empty lines to serve as a marker.

Same! If it weren’t for this, I’d use less, as the searchability is often handy.

But it’s funny how just one tiny (and possible unintended?) “feature” turns out to be so dang useful that I keep using tail.

Yeah, right? It's not even really a "feature" of anything, just an artifact of how teletype support was originally implemented in UNIX, and yet I've been hitting the enter key for my own "marks" for decades.

> But it's funny how just one tiny (and possible unintended?) "feature" turns out to be so dang useful that I keep using tail.

"Dangling by a trivial feature"[0] seems to be a pretty common issue when people recommend 'better' software.

0: http://prog21.dadgum.com/160.html

I found myself doing this as well and decided to write a simple tool to do it "automatically" for me.

You still can't use it with less, but at least it allows you to mark "segments" of the log without switching to that window and mashing enter.

https://gitlab.com/kevincox/watchlog

less has its own system of bookmarks: use m followed by a lowercase letter to set a mark and single quote followed by a single letter to jump to that mark. I assume that this means we can have up to 26 bookmarks, though I normally don't go much beyond two.

You can use capital letters in less too, so at least 52.

How many times have you seen the last line of a file you're tailing be something like "00:00 Logfile turned over." Both less and tail stop doing their business when a log is rotated and the inode changes. Stop that by adding or extending an alias:

    alias less='less --follow-name' # still requires <shift>-f to follow
    alias tail='tail -F'

I use tail, head, tac, grep, watch etc all the time to pick out stuff I'm looking for, sometimes I use tail -f, but it's certainly a minority of my tail invocations.

I've been using `tail -F` for decades but I forgot why!

reopens files replaced with a new inode

Equivalently, one can run `less +F <FILE>`

This reads the entire file, so for large files you'll likely want something like `less -n +F` if you want to use `less`.

Or hit v after Ctrl-C to open it in a full editor (vi or whatever editor you have as $VISUAL). Quitting the editor resumes tailing.

Okay i wasn't interested in the `less` usage in the GP comment because i use tmux to stop and view logs as they're passing by. However automatically opening in my CLI editor? That sounds sexy as hell!

My less(1) tips are:

Use "-S" to toggle the "--chop-long-lines" option at invocation or in interactive mode. This mode shows only one line on the screen for each line in a file and is helpful when viewing a log with entries much longer than the screen width. When lines are chopped less(1) lets you scroll horizontally with <LEFTARROW>/<RIGHTARROW>. Chopped mode also works in tail mode ("F" command or "+F" option).

As others have mentioned the search "/pattern" and filter "&pattern" commands are awesome and they also work in tail mode.

The -J option toggles the status column which is helpful when using search patterns or paging around a file.

Since less(1) has lots of features and navigation methods it’s good to remember the "h" command to show the help page.

And you can also use the & command to filter (out) some patterns, while you're tailing.

Another tip for `less`.

bind next-file and prev-file to N and P instead of the default :n and :p.

Makes it much more convenient to flip through files.

[for some reason macos doesn't have the lesskey command even though it has the manual for it. shrug]

You can stop output on a terminal (emulator) by exercising flow control. If you get overwhelmed by `tail` (or a similar tool's) output, hit ^S. If you are ready to resume, strike ^Q.

>couldn’t you pause/unpause the stdout with ctrl-s/ctrl-q instead?

edit: child comment is a better solution.

uh... doesn't watch just run the command over and over? I would have thought this would just print the entire file every n seconds. Now using tail with that instead of cat....

couldn’t you pause/unpause the stdout with ctrl-s/ctrl-q instead?

tailf is also a good replacement for tail --follow=name, it uses inotify internally to only look at the file when there is a change.