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retail(1)              DragonFly General Commands Manual             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
       methods.  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
       "position: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)

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