Check tail of multiple files

Question

I'm trying to skim through multiple log files to find a specific event that I can't easily grep for. I know which files it could be in and I know what I'm looking for is at the end of the files. What I need is something like this but it's only reading the first file in the string. tail `ls -x log*`

My bash is a bit rusty but I feel like I'm overlooking something simple. I am using HP-UX.

Solution

Presumably

tail log*

is what you’re after. If your tail doesn’t support multiple arguments, which appears to be the case, you’ll need to loop:

for file in log*; do echo "==> ${file} <=="; tail "${file}"; done