Tail for Windows
posted in Developers, Technology |One of the most useful unix commands is tail and its been too bad that this isn’t built into Windows. In linux you can type “tail -f filename” and it will monitor a text file and display in realtime new stuff that gets added to the end. This can be very useful for debugging servers by letting you monitor log file output.
I’ve discovered two versions of this for Windows. One “Tail for Win32″ can be found at http://tailforwin32.sourceforge.net/ . This one uses a GUI app to let you open multiple files, configure filters and watch the results. Its not a command-line utility so its not really in the spirit of the unix one, but the funcionality works great.
The other one is in the Windows Server 2003 resource kit . Once you install it, you should have the “tail” command-line utility available.