This is one of those wheels I once reinvented, but I think it was before File::Tail came out. At least I read the perldocs. Just 'perldoc -q tail'.

My 'wheel' is here if anyone's interested (look for upd_stats). It also includes an implementation of tac, which also is now sort of redundant (see File::ReadBackwards). Upd_stats is mainly a bundle of Informix related utilities, but also included some of these other things I had at the time.