retail(1) 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
options 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
Debian GNU/Linux system (but may be used by others).
retail(1)
retail 1.0.2 - Generated Sat Nov 9 07:39:30 CST 2019