This article spotlights alternative tools to tail.

The software featured here is free and open source.
| tail alternatives | |
|---|---|
| ov | Feature rich terminal pager |
| MultiTail | Monitor logfiles and command output in multiple windows |
| less | A popular pager |
| colortail | Like the tail command line utility but with colors |
| inotail | inotify-based implementation of tail |
| ptail | A dynamic tail |
| retail | The tail command with regular expressions |
| btail | Interactive file tail viewer |
Have we missed any open source alternatives to tail? Please let us know!
All the CLI tools in this series.
| Alternatives to CLI tools |
|---|
| age // awk // bc // cal // cat // cd // chmod // cksum // cloc // cmp // compress // cp // cron // curl // cut // date // dd // df // diff // dig // du // fdisk // file // find // free // ftp // grep // gzip // hexdump // history // jq // kill // less // locate // ls // lsof // make // man // more // mv / ping // ps // psql // rename // rm // sed // split // ssh // stow // strings // sudo // sysctl // tail // talk // tar // telnet // time // top // touch // traceroute // tree // uname // uniq // uptime // vi // watch // Wget // who // whois // xargs |
Explore our carefully curated directory of recommended free and open source software, covering every major software category.The directory forms part of our extensive collection of articles for Linux enthusiasts. It includes hundreds of detailed reviews, together with free and open source alternatives to proprietary software from companies such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. LinuxLinks also covers interesting projects worth exploring, Linux-compatible hardware, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Know a useful free and open source Linux application that we haven’t covered? Tell us about it using our submission form. |


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try to add screenshots of the alternatives that show at least some features.
We already show the help output for them.