What is a tail program good for? The original tail UNIX command is a program to display a text file and monitor the file for changes. All changes are displayed in realtime. So tail is perfect for watching log files.

For Windows there's no tail command. There are many good replacements for tail (e.g. BareTail or Tail for Win32) out there. LogExpert is one of these tail programs. It has nice features which are very useful if you have to work with log files.

The main focus is log file content filtering, searching and fast navigation.

By Praveen Puri

We can combine two unix commands, ls and tail, to always select the most recent file in a directory. This comes in very handy if you are debugging and running a program multiple times, thus constantly creating new log files.

ls -rt will list the files in the current directory, sorted by ascending time. So, the most recent files will be listed last.

This command by itself is valuable in directories that contain lots of log files. When you use this command, the old files will scroll off the screen, and you will always see the most recent files.

tail -n will take text as input and display the last n lines. So, for example, tail -1 will display the last line of text.