Get last n lines of a file, similar to tail

Question

I\'m writing a log file viewer for a web application and for that I want to paginate through the lines of the log file. The items in the file are line based with the newest

Answer 1

Assumes a unix-like system on Python 2 you can do:

import os
def tail(f, n, offset=0):
  stdin,stdout = os.popen2("tail -n "+n+offset+" "+f)
  stdin.close()
  lines = stdout.readlines(); stdout.close()
  return lines[:,-offset]

For python 3 you may do:

import subprocess
def tail(f, n, offset=0):
    proc = subprocess.Popen(['tail', '-n', n + offset, f], stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
    lines = proc.stdout.readlines()
    return lines[:, -offset]