tail command

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi ,
I have found a interesting thing about tail command:
when I tried to use 'tail -1 *' to look at every file with the current derectory, I only got one line of result of one file.
But if I use 'head -1 *', I would get multiple lines.

Is there a way to do get multiple lines with 'tail -1 *' command?

Thanks a lot!

2

Well, if you check the man pages for head and tail, you will find why this is so:

man head:
head [-c|-l] [-n count] [file ...]

man tail:
tail [-f] [-b number] [file]

The ... in the head manpage shows that head can take multiple filenames in input, while tail cannot.

You can check tail of all files in a directory as follows:

for file in *; do
tail -1 $file
done
3

Or download GNU tail...

4

Where can I download it?