Read last line from file

Question

I\'ve been bumping into a problem. I have a log on a Linux box in which is written the output from several running processes. This file can get really big sometimes and I ne

Answer 1

If you know the upper bound of line length you could do something like this.

$maxLength = 1024;
$fp = fopen('somefile.txt', 'r');
fseek($fp, -$maxLength , SEEK_END); 
$fewLines = explode("\n", fgets($fp, $maxLength));
$lastLine = $fewLines[count($fewLines) - 1];

In response to the edit: fopen just acquires a handle to the file (i.e. make sure it exists, process has permission, lets os know a process is using the file, etc...). In this example only 1024 characters from the file will be read into memory.