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retail(1)		     General Commands Manual		       retail(1)

retail
     retail - a program to track logfile changes.

SYNOPSIS
     retail [-h] [-p prefix] [-s suffix] [-d] files ...

DESCRIPTION
     This manual page documents briefly the program retail.

     retail tries to be an intelligent incremental logfile reader.  It will read
     a	file  or  list	of files given as arguments, and output any new contents
     thereof to stdout.  If the file has changed, it will attempt to handle  the
     situation intelligently.

     It  keeps	track  of what parts of a file it has read in the past, and only
     reads lines which have been appended since the last time it  was  asked  to
     read the file(s) in question.  It does this via several methods.  First, it
     tracks the position in the file in bytes, and tries to return there on sub-
     sequent  calls.   If it is unable to return to the previous position, or if
     the data found at the previous position has changed  since  last  time,  it
     will rewind to the beginning of the file, and search for the data which was
     at the last known position.  Failing any of those methods to find it's last
     known  position, it will rewind to the very beginning of the file, and read
     and output to stdout from there.  Oh yeah, it tracks  it's  state	info  in
     offset files named (by default) /path/file.aoffset, in the format of "posi-
     tion:last_known_data".

OPTIONS
     This  program  does NOT follow the usual GNU command line syntax, with long
     options starting with two dashes (`-').  It uses only short options as doc-
     umented below

     -d     Output debug info on stderr (probably only	of  use  for  developers
	    like me).

     -h     Show summary of options.

     -V     Show version of program.

     -s suffix
	    Change the default suffix to something other than .aoffset.

     -p prefix
	    Specify an alternative directory to place the offset files into.

SEE ALSO
     This program is not documented fully anywhere else that I know of, not even
     in The Rise and Fall of a Fooish Bar.

AUTHOR
     This  manual page was written by A.L.Lambert <al@xjack.org>, for the Debian
     GNU/Linux system (but may be used by others).

								       retail(1)

Want to link to this manual page? Use this URL:
<https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=retail&sektion=1&manpath=FreeBSD+Ports+15.1.quarterly>

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