file - Java IO implementation of unix/linux "tail -f"

Question

I'm wondering what techniques and/or library to use to implement the functionality of the linux command "tail -f ". I'm essentially looking for a drop in add-on/replacement for java.io.FileReader. Client code could look something like this:

TailFileReader lft = new TailFileReader("application.log");
BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(lft);
String line;
try {
  while (true) {
    line= br.readLine();
    // do something interesting with line
  }
} catch (IOException e) {
  // barf
}

The missing piece is a reasonable implementation of TailFileReader. It should be able to read parts of the file that exist before the file is opened as well as the lines that are added.

Answer 1

Take a look at Apache Commons implementation of Tailer class. It does seem to handle log rotation as well.