The File::Tail package is designed for reading files which are continously
appended to (the name comes from the tail -f directive). Usualy such files are
logfiles of some description.

The package tries not to busy wait on the file, dynamicaly calcultaing 
how long it should wait before it pays to try reading the file again.

The package should handle normal log truncations ("close; move; open"
or "cat /dev/null >file") transparently. 

Currently this package requires Time::HiRes, because it often needs to sleep
for less than one second. (I don't beleive one should busy wait on a file
just because it gets more than one line/second).

The file logwatch is a simple example of use. Try it with 
./logwatch /var/log/syslog 1 if you want to see how File::Tail works.

This version now returns a tied filehandle, but it can also be used as 
a normal object.

A future version will include tail -n functionality and a select equivalnet.


To build this module, enter
perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install


If you have any problems, contact me at matija.grabnar@arnes.si

Copyright (c) 1997 Matija Grabnar. 

All rights reserved. This program is free software; you can
redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. 