Hacker News Reader

If you don't want to clog up your terminal, try 'less' and then hit 'F' to follow.

Better yet use 'less +F'. It's as easy to remember as tail -f.

The advantage of using less here is that you can easily interrupt the tailing (ctrl-c). For example, to search. Then just hit 'F' again to restart tailing. But now your search pattern will be highlighted as the data streams by.

I have been using both "tail -f" and less for years, and never knew about this. Thank you. In three lines of text, you have made my logfile-centric life oh-so-much easier to deal with.

I'm using Ctrl+S and Ctrl+Q for interrupting tail -f, but that's missing the search feature of course.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com