

Stop using tail -f (mostly) - antouank
http://www.brianstorti.com/stop-using-tail/

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alayne
Previous discussion
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9290332](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9290332)

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hansjorg
Tried this for a while the last time I saw this posted somewhere, but went
back to using tail.

Using less +F you're not able to add blank lines to the terminal. Seems kind
of silly, but it's very useful to see if there has been any output since last
time you took a look.

~~~
borkabrak
This is exactly the reason I've never switched to using `less +F`, as well.
When I tail a log, I'm usually looking for _sections_ of it corresponding to
particular test runs. Adding blank lines or even rows of dashes/equal signs
lets me make the distinction clearly visible.

~~~
ajbetteridge
Same here. I'm normally using "tail -f | grep something" which less +f doesn't
seem to handle.

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ayanamist
If file is very large like several gigabytes, `tail` is much faster than
`less`

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DArcMattr
I'm still going to use tail -f, in tmux. I get the log stream, and I get
tmux's search & movement.

