Re: tail for a list of files

[R. G. Newbury]

> From: bruce 
> Subject: Re: tail for a list of files
> On Sun, Mar 4, 2018 at 2:31 PM, Joe Zeff  wrote:
> > On 03/04/2018 11:15 AM, R. G. Newbury wrote:
> > > find .  -name "*.pdf" | tail -n 2
> > > does not 'find' the files in canonical order: it outputs 124.pdf and
> > > 126.pdf
> > What does it print if you don't run it through tail?
>
> um.. hey guys....
>
> I wanted to get the last X lines of each file from an input/wildcard
> list of files !!
>
> so.. I wanted the last 5 lines of the 126.pdf as well as the last 5
> lines of the 125.pdf...
> --NOT the last X files from a list of files..
>
> thanks

Ahh, well you should *said* so. We all went running off in all 
directions *at once*!
This time I created 4 files 123.txt, 124.txt etc. each with 10 lines 
numbered 1 to 10

To get the last 5 lines of every ".txt" file
Use:
$ for file in $(find .  -name "*.txt"); do cat $file | tail -n 5; done

To display the filename, and last 5 lines of each of the last 2 files
Use:
$ for file in $(find .  -name "*.txt" | sort | tail -n 2); do echo 
$file; cat $file | tail -n 5; done

Output is:
./125.txt
7
8
9
10

./126.txt
7
8
9
10

YOu may have to be careful about the use of the 'sort' pipe: you may 
need to add a switch to enforce a particular sort order. Sort can leave 
you out of sorts that way.

Geoff