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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 meth- ods. First, it tracks the position in the file in bytes, and tries to return there on subsequent 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 op- tions as documented 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 De- bian GNU/Linux system (but may be used by others). retail(1)
retail | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | SEE ALSO | AUTHOR
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