Java IO implementation of unix/linux “tail -f”

Question

I\'m wondering what techniques and/or library to use to implement the functionality of the linux command \"tail -f \". I\'m essentially looking for a drop in add-on/replace

Answer 1

If your code only ever will have to run on Unix systems, you may be able to get away with just shelling out and calling tail -f directly.

As a more involved alternative, you could take a look at the implementation of GNU tail and port that over to Java. (I'm not sure whether this wouldn't already make your code a derivative work, though.)

Answer 2

I found this nice tail implementation.

Author : amelandri

Souce from : https://gist.github.com/amelandri/1376896

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.FileReader;
import java.io.IOException;

/**
 * Java implementation of the Unix tail command
 * 
 * @param args[0] File name
 * @param args[1] Update time (seconds). Optional. Default value is 1 second
 * 
 * @author Luigi Viggiano (original author) http://it.newinstance.it/2005/11/19/listening-changes-on-a-text-file-unix-tail-implementation-with-java/
 * @author Alessandro Melandri (modified by)
 * */
public class Tail {

  static long sleepTime = 1000;

  public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {

    if (args.length > 0){

      if (args.length > 1)
        sleepTime = Long.parseLong(args[1]) * 1000;

      BufferedReader input = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(args[0]));
      String currentLine = null;

      while (true) {

        if ((currentLine = input.readLine()) != null) {
          System.out.println(currentLine);
          continue;
        }

        try {
          Thread.sleep(sleepTime);
        } catch (InterruptedException e) {
          Thread.currentThread().interrupt();
          break;
        }

      }
      input.close();

    } else {
      System.out.println("Missing parameter!\nUsage: java JavaTail fileName [updateTime (Seconds. default to 1 second)]");
        }
      }

}

Answer 3

Check JLogTailer, which does this logic.

The main point in the code is:

public void run() {
    try {
        while (_running) {
            Thread.sleep(_updateInterval);
            long len = _file.length();
            if (len < _filePointer) {
                // Log must have been jibbled or deleted.
                this.appendMessage("Log file was reset. Restarting logging from start of file.");
                _filePointer = len;
            }
            else if (len > _filePointer) {
                // File must have had something added to it!
                RandomAccessFile raf = new RandomAccessFile(_file, "r");
                raf.seek(_filePointer);
                String line = null;
                while ((line = raf.readLine()) != null) {
                    this.appendLine(line);
                }
                _filePointer = raf.getFilePointer();
                raf.close();
            }
        }
    }
    catch (Exception e) {
        this.appendMessage("Fatal error reading log file, log tailing has stopped.");
    }
    // dispose();
}