Looking for a file viewer that will react to file changes

[machinegodzilla]

Hi,


I'm looking for a tool that will do a job similar to "tail -f". I have a file that is being modified at certain intervals and I want to open that file and see these modifications as they happen.

"tail -f" will only show new lines that are appended to the end of a file and what I need is something that will reflect any changes to the file content anywhere in the file at some specified intervals.


Thanks

[Irithori]

Well,
to show differences, you need the previous version.

I dare not mention some hackish attempts with cp, mv and diff as they will surely fall apart as soon as we are talking about bigger files or low latency.

Also I do not know the size or content of the file, nor the update interval.
If possible, can you implement subversion commits?
Or any other version control system for that matter?

Then you can see any change and even restore these.

[machinegodzilla]

Thanks for your reply Irithori, but it's not exactly what I'm after. It looks like my question wasn't entirely clear. I'll better clarify what I need.

I don't want to perform a diff, or highlight new stuff, what I want is simply to have a file reloaded automatically whenever it's modified.

[Rubberman]

You might want to look into the inotify facilities. You can watch for changes to a file, directory tree, or file system. You can script it to read/refresh your view of a file of interest when its contents are modified.

[machinegodzilla]

Thank you, I will look into that tool.