The version of tail bundled in GNU coreutils was written by Paul Rubin, David MacKenzie, Ian Lance Taylor, and Jim Meyering.
[1] The command is available as a separate package for Microsoft Windows as part of the UnxUtils collection of native Win32 ports of common GNU Unix-like utilities.
[6] Inotail was an implementation using the inotify Linux kernel interface (introduced in version 2.6.13 in August 2005) to check whether new data is available instead of polling every second, as the original tail did.
MultiTail not only displays logfiles in colors, it can also merge, filter, scrollback and split a terminal window into subwindows.
As with all Unix commands, use man pages on the running system for specific options and actions.
The following command will display the last 10 lines of messages and append new lines to the display as new lines are added to messages: To keep following the log even when it is recreated, renamed, or removed as part of log rotation, at least BSD and GNU implementations provide a -F option which is useful in cases when the user is following a log file that rotates.