This is a tail -f and the log file is a dhcp log so it has A LOT of lines not only 10 :)

dhcp log so it has A LOT of lines not only 10 :)

Here's a live example for you:

$ tail -f multtable.txt
0
9
18
27
36
45
54
63
72
81
[download]

The code that generated that was:

for ix in 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 
do
   for iy in 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 
   do
         n=`expr ${ix} '*' ${iy}`
         echo $n >> multtable.txt
   done 
done
[download]

That makes 100 lines. I do a "tail -f" and I see the last 10 lines all day long until someone writes to it. While I can't comment on the data set you are working with I can tell you about the behavior of most *nix commands.

---

Peter L. Berghold -- Unix Professional
Peter -at- Berghold -dot- Net; AOL IM redcowdawg Yahoo IM: blue_cowdawg