This is a small ruby library that allows it to "tail" files in Ruby, including following a file, that still is growing like the unix command 'tail -f' can.

The latest version of File::Tail (file-tail) can be found at

http://flori.github.com/file-tail

To install file-tail via its gem type:

File::Tail is a module in the File class. A lightweight class interface for logfiles can be seen under File::Tail::Logfile.

Direct extension of File objects with File::Tail works like that:

File.open(filename) do |log|
  log.extend(File::Tail)
  log.interval # 10
  log.backward(10)
  log.tail { |line| puts line }
end

It's also possible to mix File::Tail in your own File classes (see also File::Tail::Logfile):

class MyFile < File
  include File::Tail
end
log # MyFile.new("myfile")
log.interval # 10
log.backward(10)
log.tail { |line| print line }

The forward/backward method returns self, so it's possible to chain methods together like that:

log.backward(10).tail { |line| puts line }

A command line utility named rtail, that uses File::Tail is provided as well.

To create the documentation of this module, type

$ rake doc

and the API documentation is generated.

In the examples directory is a small example of tail and pager program that use this module. You also may want look at the end of examples/tail.rb for a little example.

Florian Frank mailto:flori@ping.de

Apache License, Version 2.0 – See the COPYING file in the source archive.