At certain times while using Gentoo you are going to have to perform a large emerge, for example when you do an update world. It can be challenging to keep track of the status of this emerge with all the output flying by on the screen. It can also become a problem if you want to check on the status from another machine that did not initiate the emerge.

Thankfully you can check the /var/log/emerge.log and get the current status.

Run this command to see the last 10 lines of the log.

$ sudo tail /var/log/emerge.log

You can combine this command with watch and get real-time updates. This command will automatically update every second.

$ watch -n 1 "sudo tail /var/log/emerge.log"

Likewise you can use the ‘-f‘ tail option to get updates.

$ sudo tail -f /var/log/emerge.log

Related posts

1. View program output with watch
2. Speed up Gentoo emerge with “parallel-fetch”
3. Find the exit status of a previous command in Bash

Similar to the tail command which shows you the last few lines of a text file, the head command lets you to quickly view the first few lines.

The head command syntax.

head [options] file

By default head will show you the first 10 lines of a text file.

$ head textfile.txt

You can change the number of lines displayed by adding ‘-n‘ option and adding the number of lines.

$ head -n 3 textfile.txt

This will show the first 3 lines in the file.

Related posts

1. Display the last part of a file with tail
2. Determine file type with the file command
3. Delete a specific line from a text file with sed

Similar to the head command which shows you the first few lines of a text file, the tail command lets you to quickly view the last few lines of a text file. It also supports a monitoring mode which displays ongoing changes within the file.

The tail command syntax.

tail [options] file

By default tail will show you the last 10 lines of a text file.

$ tail textfile.txt

You can change the number of lines displayed by adding ‘-n‘ option and adding the number of lines.

$ tail -n 3 textfile.txt

This will show the last 3 lines in the file.

You can keep track of ongoing changes within the file by turning on monitoring mode with the ‘-f‘ option. It is especially helpful when you want to keep an eye on log files.

$ tail -f /var/log/syslog

As lines are appended to the log file they are also displayed by tail.

You can exit the program by pressing Ctrl-C.

Related posts

1. Display the first part of a file with head
2. Determine file type with the file command
3. Delete a specific line from a text file with sed