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 direcotry 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.