See also: HEAD, LIST, and TYPE.

 

File Selection

 

Supports command dialog, extended wildcards, ranges, multiple file names, and include lists.

 

Internet: Can be used with FTP servers, including HTTP/HTTPS files, e.g.

 

tail "https://jpsoft.com/notfound.htm"

 

Usage:

 

The TAIL command displays the last part of a file or files. It is normally only useful for displaying ASCII text files (i.e. alphanumeric characters arranged in lines separated by CR/LF). Executable files (.EXE) and many data files may be unreadable when displayed with TAIL because they include non-alphanumeric characters or unusual line separators.

 

You can press Ctrl-S to pause TAIL's display and then any key to continue.

 

The following example displays the last 15 lines of the files MEMO1 and MEMO2:

 

tail /n15 memo1 memo2

 

To display text from the clipboard use CLIP: as the file name. CLIP: will not return any data if the clipboard does not contain text. See Highlighting and Copying Text for additional information on CLIP:.

 

If you don't enter any arguments, TAIL will display its command dialog.

 

TAIL sets two internal variables:

 

 

TAIL will recognize Unicode (UTF-16) files based on either a BOM or specific UTF-16 sequences at the beginning of the file. TAIL will recognize UTF-8 files based on either a BOM or UTF-8 extended characters within the first 2K of the file.

 

•FTP Usage

 

TAIL can also display files on FTP servers. For example:

 

tail "ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/index"

 

You can also use the IFTP command to start an FTP session on a server, and then use an abbreviated syntax to specify the files and directories you want.

 

•NTFS File Streams

 

TAIL supports file streams on NTFS drives. You can type an individual stream by specifying the stream name, for example:

 

tail streamfile:s1

 

•Pipes

 

TAIL can optionally be used with an input pipe. For example:

 

dir | tail /n2

 

This is not ordinarily feasible in Windows because pipes can't be "rewound", and therefore the pipe has to be written to a temporary memory buffer and the TAIL taken from there. Consequently, this limits the amount you can actually display in TAIL to less than a million bytes when the input is piped.

 

Examples:

 

 

 

Options:

 

 

 

You can specify /A:= to display a dialog to help you set individual attributes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You may use any combination of the sorting options below. If multiple options are used, the listing will be sorted with the first sort option as the primary key, the next as the secondary key, and so on: