3.3.4.3. The head and tail commands

These two commands display the n first/last lines of a file respectively. To see the last ten commands entered:

tony:~> tail -10 .bash_history 
locate configure | grep bin
man bash
cd
xawtv &
grep usable /usr/share/dict/words 
grep advisable /usr/share/dict/words 
info quota
man quota
echo $PATH
frm

head works similarly. The tail command has a handy feature to continuously show the last n lines of a file that changes all the time. This -f option is often used by system administrators to check on log files. More information is located in the system documentation files.