Re: how to tail w/o folding the output?

[Dave Sherohman <esper@sherohman.org>]

On Thu, Aug 24, 2006 at 08:50:50AM -0500, Hugo Vanwoerkom wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> How do you run tail and not have it fold the output?
> 
> E.g. I run:
> 
> tail -s 1 -n 40 -f kern.log
> 
> But it folds the output so that what is messy is now messier...

So you want the lines to be cut off at the end of the screen rather than
wrapping onto the next line?  You can do this with:

tail -s 1 -n 40 -f kern.log | cut -c 1-80

(I'm assuming an 80-column display.  Change the '1-80' to match your
screen size if this assumption is not correct.)

That doesn't seem terribly useful to me, though, since it discards a lot
of potentially important information.  Did I misunderstand what you were
looking for?

-- 
The freedoms that we enjoy presently are the most important victories of the
White Hats over the past several millennia, and it is vitally important that
we don't give them up now, only because we are frightened.
  - Eolake Stobblehouse (http://stobblehouse.com/text/battle.html)