How can I tail a log file in Python?

Question

I\'d like to make the output of tail -F or something similar available to me in Python without blocking or locking. I\'ve found some really old code to do that here, but I\'

Answer 1

The only portable way to tail -f a file appears to be, in fact, to read from it and retry (after a sleep) if the read returns 0. The tail utilities on various platforms use platform-specific tricks (e.g. kqueue on BSD) to efficiently tail a file forever without needing sleep.

Therefore, implementing a good tail -f purely in Python is probably not a good idea, since you would have to use the least-common-denominator implementation (without resorting to platform-specific hacks). Using a simple subprocess to open tail -f and iterating through the lines in a separate thread, you can easily implement a non-blocking tail operation in Python.

Example implementation:

import threading, Queue, subprocess
tailq = Queue.Queue(maxsize=10) # buffer at most 100 lines

def tail_forever(fn):
    p = subprocess.Popen(["tail", "-f", fn], stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
    while 1:
        line = p.stdout.readline()
        tailq.put(line)
        if not line:
            break

threading.Thread(target=tail_forever, args=(fn,)).start()

print tailq.get() # blocks
print tailq.get_nowait() # throws Queue.Empty if there are no lines to read