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When using tail -f to display the last few lines of a file, how can I make it only ever display 5 lies, overwriting previous lines when the file is added to?

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    A simple solution is to write into a terminal window with 5 lines. – sudodus Jan 5 '17 at 22:08
  • @sododus What about a convoluted solution? – Ginger Jan 5 '17 at 22:09
  • Please explain what you need, how you intend to use it? – sudodus Jan 5 '17 at 22:12
  • I'm using tail -f on a linode server. The process is active so I get a page of text every second, and it seems to hang a lot. If I could just view the last 5 lines, that would be enough to let me know that the process is running ok. – Ginger Jan 5 '17 at 22:14
  • tail outputs continuously. It doesn't clear the the terminal and cannot overwrite already existing lines. I'd say what you're seeking cannot be done, at least not with tail itself – Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy Jan 5 '17 at 22:55
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Suppose you want to watch the file "file-to-be-watched", the following may do the trick:

watch -n 1 tail -5 file-to-be-watched
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Are you working at a text mode console, or for example via ssh from a desktop environment?

I made a small demo with date which uses xterm.

xterm -geometry 60x6 -e bash -c 'while true; do dat=$(date "+%H:%M:%S");echo "Hello $dat";echo "world $dat";echo "alias $dat";echo "blank $dat";echo "      $dat"; sleep 1;done'|tail -f

You should be able to replace the while loop with your program, that prints lines every second

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