Just FYI, UNIX had a bunch of utilities that could emulate a vanilla version of tail on a command line. You can use sed, awk and quite a few others to simply show line N to the end of a file or other variations. Of course the way many things were done back then had less focus on efficiency than how to stepwise make changes in a pipeline so reading from the beginning to end was not an issue.
-----Original Message----- From: Marco Sulla <marco.sulla.pyt...@gmail.com> To: Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> Cc: python-list@python.org Sent: Wed, May 11, 2022 5:27 pm Subject: Re: tail On Wed, 11 May 2022 at 22:09, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Have you actually checked those three, or do you merely suppose them to be > true? I only suppose, as I said. I should do some benchmark and some other tests, and, frankly, I don't want to. I don't want to because I'm quite sure the implementation is fast, since it reads by chunks and cache them. I'm not sure it's 100% free of bugs, but the concept is very simple, since it simply mimics the *nix tail, so it should be reliable. > > > I'd very much like to see a CPython implementation of that function. It > > could be a method of a file object opened in binary mode, and *only* in > > binary mode. > > > > What do you think about it? > > Still not necessary. You can simply have it in your own toolkit. Why > should it be part of the core language? Why not? > How much benefit would it be > to anyone else? I suppose that every programmer, at least one time in its life, did a tail. > All the same assumptions are still there, so it still > isn't general It's general. It mimics the *nix tail. I can't think of a more general way to implement a tail. > I don't understand why this wants to be in the standard library. Well, the answer is really simple: I needed it and if I found it in the stdlib, I used it instead of writing the first horrible function. Furthermore, tail is such a useful tool that I suppose many others are interested, based on this quick Google search: https://www.google.com/search?q=python+tail A question on Stackoverflow really much voted, many other Stackoverflow questions, a package that seems to exactly do the same thing, that is mimic *nix tail, and a blog post about how to tail in Python. Furthermore, if you search python tail pypi, you can find a bunch of other packages: https://www.google.com/search?q=python+tail+pypi It seems the subject is quite popular, and I can't imagine otherwise. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
