Get last n lines of a file, similar to tail

Question

I\'m writing a log file viewer for a web application and for that I want to paginate through the lines of the log file. The items in the file are line based with the newest

Answer 1

Here is my answer. Pure python. Using timeit it seems pretty fast. Tailing 100 lines of a log file that has 100,000 lines:

>>> timeit.timeit('tail.tail(f, 100, 4098)', 'import tail; f = open("log.txt", "r");', number=10)
0.0014600753784179688
>>> timeit.timeit('tail.tail(f, 100, 4098)', 'import tail; f = open("log.txt", "r");', number=100)
0.00899195671081543
>>> timeit.timeit('tail.tail(f, 100, 4098)', 'import tail; f = open("log.txt", "r");', number=1000)
0.05842900276184082
>>> timeit.timeit('tail.tail(f, 100, 4098)', 'import tail; f = open("log.txt", "r");', number=10000)
0.5394978523254395
>>> timeit.timeit('tail.tail(f, 100, 4098)', 'import tail; f = open("log.txt", "r");', number=100000)
5.377126932144165

Here is the code:

import os


def tail(f, lines=1, _buffer=4098):
    """Tail a file and get X lines from the end"""
    # place holder for the lines found
    lines_found = []

    # block counter will be multiplied by buffer
    # to get the block size from the end
    block_counter = -1

    # loop until we find X lines
    while len(lines_found) < lines:
        try:
            f.seek(block_counter * _buffer, os.SEEK_END)
        except IOError:  # either file is too small, or too many lines requested
            f.seek(0)
            lines_found = f.readlines()
            break

        lines_found = f.readlines()

        # we found enough lines, get out
        # Removed this line because it was redundant the while will catch
        # it, I left it for history
        # if len(lines_found) > lines:
        #    break

        # decrement the block counter to get the
        # next X bytes
        block_counter -= 1

    return lines_found[-lines:]

Answer 2

Here is a pretty simple implementation:

with open('/etc/passwd', 'r') as f:
  try:
    f.seek(0,2)
    s = ''
    while s.count('\n') < 11:
      cur = f.tell()
      f.seek((cur - 10))
      s = f.read(10) + s
      f.seek((cur - 10))
    print s
  except Exception as e:
    f.readlines()

Answer 3

This is my version of tailf

import sys, time, os

filename = 'path to file'

try:
    with open(filename) as f:
        size = os.path.getsize(filename)
        if size < 1024:
            s = size
        else:
            s = 999
        f.seek(-s, 2)
        l = f.read()
        print l
        while True:
            line = f.readline()
            if not line:
                time.sleep(1)
                continue
            print line
except IOError:
    pass

Answer 4

There is very useful module that can do this:

from file_read_backwards import FileReadBackwards

with FileReadBackwards("/tmp/file", encoding="utf-8") as frb:

# getting lines by lines starting from the last line up
for l in frb:
    print(l)

Answer 5

The simplest way is to use deque:

from collections import deque

def tail(filename, n=10):
    with open(filename) as f:
        return deque(f, n)

Answer 6

based on S.Lott's top voted answer (Sep 25 '08 at 21:43), but fixed for small files.

def tail(the_file, lines_2find=20):  
    the_file.seek(0, 2)                         #go to end of file
    bytes_in_file = the_file.tell()             
    lines_found, total_bytes_scanned = 0, 0
    while lines_2find+1 > lines_found and bytes_in_file > total_bytes_scanned: 
        byte_block = min(1024, bytes_in_file-total_bytes_scanned)
        the_file.seek(-(byte_block+total_bytes_scanned), 2)
        total_bytes_scanned += byte_block
        lines_found += the_file.read(1024).count('\n')
    the_file.seek(-total_bytes_scanned, 2)
    line_list = list(the_file.readlines())
    return line_list[-lines_2find:]

    #we read at least 21 line breaks from the bottom, block by block for speed
    #21 to ensure we don't get a half line

Hope this is useful.