tail a file (win)

[John Machin]

On 21/04/2006 11:24 AM, Ryan Ginstrom wrote:
>> Behalf Of david brochu jr
>> I wrote a script to monitor ping activity and output it to a 
>> log file. I am using windows and want to have another script 
>> constantly check the latest entry to see if Request timed out 
>> is seen. Is there a way to "tail" a file much like I would in 
>> Unix so I can just see the latest entry and move from there? 
> 
> The method I would use that is not RAM/CPU intensive would be to create a
> memory-mapped file, take the size of the file, and increment your pointer to
> file_length - tail_size.
> 
> The Windows API functions to look at are:
> CreateFile
> CreateFileMapping
> MapViewOfFile
> 
> I'm sorry, but I'm not a ctypes guru so can't tell you how you would
> accomplish this in python. (The C(++) code is fairly straightforward,
> however).

This possibly could be done without using the Windows API, just by using 
the mmap module and otherwise standard Python file functionality.

However if the need would be met by a tail.exe, consider not 
re-inventing the wheel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GnuWin32