Tail a file over http.

The script uses wget to continuosly download a file from a URL and writes it a local file. The local file can be tail -f-ed.

Download the scipt to your machine. Add a symlink to the script using ln -s inside one of your bin directories in your PATH so that you can run the script as a command. After that, run

$ tailh [-O outfile] [-o logfile] [-v] URL

and while this is running, do

$ tail -f outfile

to view the contents.

-O outfile

The downloaded contents will be written to outfile. This is passed on to the -O file argument for wget.

If not provided, out/tailh.out will be used.

tailh uses wget with -c -a arguments, so that the download is continuously done and the output file is appended. wget uses the output file's size as the offset to continue the download. So for new downloads, make sure a new output file is used.

Refer the -O file section in wget documentation for more info.

-o logfile

Logs all messages to logfile.

This works by passing setting the -o logfile for wget. If not passed, logfile defaults to /dev/null, or /dev/stdout if -v option is passed

-v

[This functionality needs more work]

If the -o logfile is not set, prints messages to stdout. Otherwise, prints the URL, and the filenames used.