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

I found the Popen above to be the best solution. It's quick and dirty and it works For python 2.6 on Unix machine i used the following

def GetLastNLines(self, n, fileName):
    """
    Name:           Get LastNLines
    Description:        Gets last n lines using Unix tail
    Output:         returns last n lines of a file
    Keyword argument:
    n -- number of last lines to return
    filename -- Name of the file you need to tail into
    """
    p = subprocess.Popen(['tail','-n',str(n),self.__fileName], stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
    soutput, sinput = p.communicate()
    return soutput

soutput will have will contain last n lines of the code. to iterate through soutput line by line do:

for line in GetLastNLines(50,'myfile.log').split('\n'):
    print line