tail and ls -l inconsistency

Question

Hello I have rare situation and no sure if this really fails.

I am monitoring a file , I get the size using ls -ald and then i run tail -n command but sometime i see increase in the size but tail -n does not return anything.

Any clue on why this could happen.

Answer 1

If you are monitoring a file, then you expecting that it is being written to (growing in size)? Yes?

Try

tail -f -n${Number} filename

From tail --help (on MingW)

-f, --follow[={name|descriptor}]
           **output appended data as the file grows**;
            -f, --follow, and --follow=descriptor are equivalent

I hope this helps.

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