tailf、tail -f 和 tail -F 的区别

man tailf 结果如下：

       tailf will print out the last 10 lines of a file and then wait for the file to grow.  It is similar to tail -f but does not access the file when it is not growing.  This has the side effect of not updating the access time for the file, so a filesystem flush does not occur periodically when no log activity is happening. tailf is extremely useful for monitoring log files on a laptop when logging is infrequent and the user desires that the hard disk spin down to conserve battery life.

man tail 结果如下：

    tail  -f      The -f option causes tail to not stop when end of file is reached, but rather to wait for additional data to be appended to the input.  The -f option is ignored if the standard input is a pipe, but not if it is a FIFO.

    tail  -F      The -F option implies the -f option, but tail will also check to see if the file being followed has been renamed or rotated.  The file is closed and reopened when tail detects that the filename being read from has a new inode number.  The -F option is ignored if reading from standard input rather than a file.

总结下：

tail -f      等同于--follow=descriptor，根据文件描述符进行追踪，当文件改名或被删除，追踪停止

tail -F     等同于--follow=name  --retry，根据文件名进行追踪，并保持重试，即该文件被删除或改名后，如果再次创建相同的文件名，会继续追踪

tailf        等同于tail -f，与tail -f不同的是，如果文件不增长，它不会去访问磁盘文件，所以tailf特别适合那些便携机上跟踪日志文件，因为它减少了磁盘访问，可以省电