Simple no-nonsense file tailing.

go get -u github.com/jacobcase/gotail

gotail is a simple go module that provides regular file tailing. While there are a few other tail libraries, many of them are some combination of unmaintained, buggy, or overly complex.

gotail currently exposes a simple file polling implementation. It does not assume that you only want to read newline delimited text data, nor does it assume you want to consume it over a channel. Instead, implementations in this module expose file tailing as a simple io.ReadCloser that never reaches EOF, transparently consuming files as they are rotated.

gotail will NOT work correctly on files that are truncated.

Polling may be excessive for some applications. This module was designed with large and frequently written log files in mind, such as edge proxy logs.

So far, gotail has only been testing on Linux. However, the poller implementation doesn't depend on any OS specific features that aren't abstracted by the OS package, so it should work on most systems.

Contributions welcome! An fsnotify implementation would be nice and I may get around to adding it some day.

• File checkpoints for resuming on restart
• Readline implementation that can provide line aligned checkpoints.
• More thorough testing
  • Test seeking
  • Test correct offset tracking