4.2.12. tail — print last few lines of a file

With the tail command, you can view the last few (default: 10) lines of a file.

For example:

tail /usr/share/dict/words

élan's
émigré
émigré's
émigrés
épée
épée's
épées
étude
étude's
études

The tail and the head command discussed earlier, are useful when you want to quickly view the contents of a large text file.

In both cases, you can control the number of lines displayed, using the -n option, instead of the default value (10).

For example:

tail -n 5 /usr/share/dict/words

will display the last 5 lines of the file.