WTAIL(1)

NAME
wtail - watch multiple files

SYNOPSIS
wtail --help
wtail --version
wtail file ...

DESCRIPTION
wtail does the equivalent of tail -f on several files at once. The screen is split into as many parts as there are files to watch. If a file could not be opened, the reason is printed in the middle of its window. wtail will keep trying to open files that failed, just like GNU tail does with the --retry option. Control characters are represented using two-character strings in reverse video. wtail's idea of a control character is anything in the ranges 00h-1Fh and 80h-9Fh plus 7Fh, minus 09h and 0Ah, regardless of the locale. The notation for characters between 00h and 1Fh is ^@ through ^_. The notation for 7Fh is ^?. The notation for characters between 80h and 9Fh is ~@ through ~_. To quit, press [q] or [Q] or [esc] or [ctrl]-[q].

OPTIONS

--help
    Print usage to standard output and exit successfully. This option is recognised only if it's the only argument to wtail.

--version
    Print version number to standard output and exit successfully. This option is recognised only if it's the only argument to wtail.

BUGS
SIGWINCH is ignored. Should print idle time. Should support horizontal scrolling ŕ la less -S. Should have different options for files that can't be opened :
• allocate a window and periodically try to open again,
• forget about them and don't allocate a window,
• abort. Assumes ISO 8859-* display. Should detect that a file has been truncated. Catch-up rate is limited. That's not always the right thing. If there are too many files, aborts without an error message. Keyboard input doesn't work if standard input is not the tty. Should be a bit smarter WRT newlines. Lines exactly 80 character long cause skipping. The last newline is printed which wastes screen real-estate. On NetBSD 1.5, the native curses sets stdscr to NULL when stdin is not a tty. It's not a big problem except that it causes make test to fail. Another reason to use newwin(), I suppose.

AUTHOR
André Majorel <URL:http://www.teaser.fr/~amajorel/>

LEGAL
wtail is copyright André Majorel 2002-2003. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of version 2 of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation. This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details. You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA.

SEE ALSO
gtail(1), tail(1), xtail(1)