leobcn/gotail

A golang version of the UNIX command "tail"

gotail

A golang version of the UNIX command "tail"*.

* Minus a whole lot of features. But if you simply want to tail lines of text from a file, it works!

##Usage: Can be used from the CLI (go install-ed) or imported into other golang projects.

CLI: Very similar to "tail":

• -file : The path to the file you want to tail. Can be relative or absolute. (required)
• -n : The number of lines to tail.

Imported: Call the function GoTail with two inputs:

• filename : The path to the file you want to tail (string).
• numLines : The number of lines you want to return from the file (int).

##Performance Comparisons: I have no idea how it performs compared to the UNIX "tail" command. I would assume worse.

##Why Did I Build This?: I needed a way to retreive the last "x" many lines of some log files for displaying in an admin console GUI. It seemed like a better idea to implement "tail" in go rather then call the system installed "tail" command and retreiving the stdout. After building the "import-able" version I figured it was easy enough to modify the code into working from the CLI as well.