This clearly is a post for novice Linux users, but never mind. This will be the first part of a series, where I cover some very basic Linux commands and techniques, that come in handy for system administrators.
One of these commands is tail. You might compare it to a wordprocessor. With tail you can print the last lines of a file on your screen.
Often you’d like to see the last lines of a log file to check what is going on. Instead of opening the file in your favourite editor and scrolling all the way down you could as well type
tail /var/log/syslog
to print the last 10 lines of the syslog file to standard output – that is your screen. You see why this command is a must have for every system administrator.
But wait. There’s more! You can easily tell tail to use something I will call monitoring mode (Alliteration, I hear you!). In that mode, tail will monitor the given file and print new lines to standard output as they appear. That’s good, if you want to test a new configuration and need to check log input in real-time. Use the f parameter:
tail -f /var/log/syslog
I hope this one was good for you. Stay tuned for more interesting commands and procedures to be published next week.
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[...] This is the second part of a series on basic Linux commands and techniques for system administrators. In the last part of the series we asked and answered the question What is tail?. Today we take a look on file integrity checking. [...]