Tail.exe: monitor changes to files

Tail for Win32 is used to monitor changes to files; displaying the changed lines in realtime. This makes Tail ideal for watching log files.

A few features of Tail:

• Watch multiple files in realtime

• Detect keyword matches, and highlight occurences

• Send mail notifications on keyword matches by SMTP or MAPI

• Plugin architecture allows you to write specialised handlers

• Can process files of any size on all types of drive (local or networked)

By default when you use tail on a file it will display the last 10 lines of the file. Change this with the -n switch (n stands for number of lines).

e.g. tail -n 20 myapplication.log

Use the -f switch to continually monitor a file (f stands for "follow").

e.g. tail -f myapplication.log

All writes to the file will also appear on the screen.