Binary "tail" a file

Question

I would guess most people on this site are familiar with tail, if not - it provides a "follow" mode that as text is appended to the file tail will dump those characters out to the terminal.

What I am looking for (and possibly to write myself if necessary) is a version of tail that works on binary files. Basically I have a wireless link that I would like to trickle a file across as it comes down from another network link. Looking over the tail source code it wouldn't be too hard to rewrite, but I would rather not reinvent the wheel! This wouldn't strictly be "tail" as I would like the entire file to be copied, but it would watch as new bytes were added and stream those.

Ideas?

Answer 1

Pipe it to hexdump:

tail -f somefile | hexdump -C

Answer 2

less somefile

Then press shift F

Answer 3

This isn't tail -- this is progressively copying a file. Look at rsync.

Answer 4

Strictly speaking, you need to write a program to do this, as tail is not specified to work on binary files. There are also buffering issues you probably want to avoid if you want to receive the new "trickled" data as soon as possible.