New subject: tail for a list of files

Sunday, 4 March 2018

...
 From: Jonathan Ryshpan <jonrysh(a)pacbell.net&gt;
 Subject: Re: tail for a list of files
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 On Sat, 2018-03-03 at 11:15 -0500, bruce wrote:
> Trying to figure out how to do a single line cmd (it should be
> possible right??) to do a tail -5 for a list of files???
>
> I thought I could combine find with exec/xargs and tail to generate
> the list of files/tail data.. But couldn't figure out the syntax..
>
> find /foo -name "*dog.dat ... tail -5    << obviously not correct.
> but
> what would work?

 I think the easy way is
 	$ find /foo -name "*dog.dat" | xargs tail -n5
 or am I missing something? I created 4 pdf files using 'touch 123.pdf'
through '126.pdf'

find .  -name "*.pdf" | tail -n 2

does not 'find' the files in canonical order: it outputs 124.pdf and 126.pdf

Neither does .... | xargs tail -n 2

Trying:
  tail -n 2 $(find .  -name "*.pdf")
gives:
==> ./125.pdf <==

==> ./123.pdf <==

==> ./124.pdf <==

==> ./126.pdf <==

NOT in order and ignores the 'tail -n 2'

  tail -n 2 $(find .  -name "*.pdf"| sort) gives the files in order, but 
ignores the tail count.

HOWEVER this works:
find .  -name "*.pdf" | sort | tail -n 2
./125.pdf
./126.pdf

Geoff