Here is a piece of code that I've written to get the last lines in a file for one of my programs: 
my @lines;
my $currLine = 0;
my $maxLines = 10;

# Go through the file, saving the last $maxLines
while (<>){
    $lines[$currLine] = $_;
    $currLine++;
    $currLine = 0 if ($currLine == $maxLines);
}

# Print out the last $maxLines
for (1..$maxLines){
    print $lines[$currLine];
    $currLine++;
    $currLine = 0 if ($currLine == $maxLines);
}

[download]
I think this code is simple enough to understand what is going on, but if you need to explain more I will. (I have to get some real work done first ;)

In reply to Re: tail a file in perl by SarahM
in thread tail a file in perl by gnu@perl

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