use strict;
use File::tail;

my $file =  File::Tail->new('C:/Users/tiang/Documents/Perl/daily.20170
+731142932.txt');

while(defined(my $line = $file->read))
{

   print "$line\n";
}
[download]

Yeah .. not surprising, since you tail the file once, and then stop.

Why not read it, sleep for a minute, then read it again, as your original script tried to do?

Alex / talexb / Toronto

Thanks PJ. We owe you so much. Groklaw -- RIP -- 2003 to 2013.

in original script, the purpose of sleep() is to compare if the size of file changes. And Tail still does not solve my problem of only populating an array with last few lines of file, so does Readbackwards.

Try it again, but like this:

#!perl -slw
use strict;
use File::Tail;

my $logfile = File::Tail->new(
  name        => 'logfile.txt' # daily logfile
  ,maxinterval => 5            # poll logfile every 5 seconds
  ,interval    => 3            # wait 3 seconds before initial 'tail'
  ,tail        => 5            # give me last 5 lines
);

print while(defined($_ = $logfile->read));
[download]

Best Regards,
Shadowsong

the file is only 8KB

Why not read the whole file then ?