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- /* TAIL.C Program to show the last x characters in a file.
-
- Copyright (c) 1984, Gordon Lee Waite
- 413 W. Pleasant Street
- Maquoketa, IA 52060
-
- Utility: TAIL
- Purpose: This utility displays a given number of characters
- from the end (tail) of an ascii file.
-
- Summary: tail filename #
-
- Arguments: name of desired file
-
- and
-
- number of characters to be shown
-
- Options: none
-
- Description
-
- The tail program will display a given number of characters,
- as counted from the end of the file. Tail finds the Ctrl-Z
- End-of-File marker in the last 512 bytes of the file.
- From there, the program counts backwards the number of
- characters specified in the command line. Then the characters
- are displayed on the screen.
-
- The program counts the CR-LF pair at the end of each line
- as two characters. So if you specify a number of 1 or 2,
- you will probably get no output from this program, as the
- last line may have a CR-LF pair before the EOF marker.
-
- Tail is a handy and quick way to examine the last few lines
- of an ASCII file (like a word processing file) without
- having to invoke an editor, or page through the entire
- file listing.
-
- Operation of TAIL with a non-ASCII file is not recommended,
- but TAIL does no checking on filename extensions.
-
- This program was compiled with the Manz Aztec C Compiler.
-
- The compile and link process is as follows:
-
- c86 tail.c
- as86 -o tail.o tail.asm
- del tail.asm
- ln -o tail.exe tail.o gorlib.lib dosa.lib videoa.lib libc.lib
- del tail.o
- */
-