[RH]

I never noticed this before, but after looking at opening up Activity Monitor and looking at my active processes over the last few days a process called tail has been showing up. I've used OS X since the Public Beta and never noticed this before. I confess I know little about unix so any help would be appreciated. Just a minute ago there were 5 separate processes under "tail" I quit them and everything seems fine. There have been no noticeable slow downs to the system. What is tail? Is there anyway to stop this from showing up in my system (10.3.3)?

RH

[msuper69]

Open Terminal and type 'man tail'.

[stuffedmonkey]

"tail" is a unix command that reads the last X lines of a text file - it is usefull for checking large logs - just checking what is new at the end.

I don't know what would cause multiple versions to pop up though.

[Millennium]

What user is running these tail commands?

[RH]

What user is running these tail commands?

The user is my login, not root or system.

RH

[Ghoser777]

What programs do you currently have running besides tail?

Matt Fahrenbacher

[Brass]

using tail with the -f modifier (ie, "tail -f") is very useful to monitor files that are being appended to (eg, log files).

tail -f will continue to display new lines at the end of a file as the lines are added to the file.

It's possible some program is monitoring files waiting for some event (or capturing data for some sinister purpose )