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tail

tail — last lines of a file. It is one of the commands you type in a terminal, and everything below is produced by running it: the output, the error you get when it goes wrong, and a terminal you can type it into yourself.

What it prints

Run against a small demo project — the same one you get in the terminal below, so the output is what you will see, not an illustration of it.

$ tail -n 5 log.txt
error: disk full
ok done
error: retry
ok finished

What it looks like when it goes wrong

The most common mistake with tail, and the exact message you get. Recognising the wording is most of the fix.

$ tail -n 3 missing.txt
tail: missing.txt: No such file or directory
Break this command down, word by word →

Common flags

  • -nhow many lines
Learn for freeTry it in the terminal

Other commands

treewcsortuniqdudf

Try it yourself

Same files as above. Nothing here can break, and nothing leaves your browser.

Where you use it

Lessons that have you type tail on a real task, rather than read about it.

Written by Mikhail Kuzmitskii