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This is what I did using tail command. When I try to output the file to screen the file is empty.

~]$ tail > AFS2F1 PASSES ALL DATA FROM INPUT TO OUTPUT PASSES ONLY SPECIFIED COLUMNS PASSES NUMBER OF SPECIFIED LINES AT BEGINNING COMBINES COLUMNS ARRANGES DATA IN SEQUENCE PASSES NUMBER OF SPECIFIED LINES AT THE END OF DATA TRANSLATES ONE OR MORE CHARACTERS DELETES DUPLICATE LINES COUNTS CHARACTERS, WORDS, OR LINES ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ

Is there anything wrong with the way I'm using tail command?

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3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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tail will only output the last 10 lines. So one way or another, you'll have to tell it you've finished typing so it knows what lines (the 10 last ones) to output.

If you press CTRL-C (the default intr character on most systems) a SIGINT signal will be sent to it which will kill it. Because it had not seen the end of input by the time you killed it, it will not have had the opportunity to write anything yet, so it will die without having output anything.

The terminal way to signify the end of input (when the terminal is in canonical mode) is to enter the eof character (by default Ctrl-D on most systems) on an empty line.

Then tail will detect that the end of input is being reached and will output the 10 last lines that it has received.

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Yes, you should provides a input to tail, so :

tail file > newfile

If you want to use STDIN :

cat file | tail > newfile

or

 head > new_file < file

or

tail > AFS2F1<<EOF PASSES ALL DATA FROM INPUT TO OUTPUT PASSES ONLY SPECIFIED COLUMNS PASSES NUMBER OF SPECIFIED LINES AT BEGINNING COMBINES COLUMNS ARRANGES DATA IN SEQUENCE PASSES NUMBER OF SPECIFIED LINES AT THE END OF DATA TRANSLATES ONE OR MORE CHARACTERS DELETES DUPLICATE LINES COUNTS CHARACTERS, WORDS, OR LINES ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ EOF
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4
  • Then how do i use tail to create a file from stdin? The way I did above was similar for cat command so i thought i would work Commented Feb 25, 2013 at 21:41
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    tail > file is perfectly fine if the user wants to type a bunch of stuff on stdin and save the last 10 lines into the file. Commented Feb 25, 2013 at 21:46
  • See my edited post Commented Feb 25, 2013 at 21:49
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    Thou shalt not use cat(1) in vain. Commented Feb 25, 2013 at 21:55
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The problem is that tail program buffers its input file until it get a eof condition, then it prints out the last lines (10 by default). Most likely you are interrupting it with ctrl-c combination that terminates it, thus the tail has no chance to print out the collected lines. If you use ctrl-d instead then you effectively send the end-of-file character to the tail's input stream, so it will print out the lines collected.

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