Question

I have a file that updates itself by appending, however this file becomes huge (500MB). I would like to read the last 50 lines in the file. How can this be done?

Answer 1

Tail -n50 will return the last 50 lines of the file.

$filename = 'test.html';
$output = shell_exec('exec tail -n50 ' . $filename);
echo $output;

Therefore, you don’t have to load the entire file in memory.

Edit:

If you want to echo “<br>” after each line you do:

echo str_replace(PHP_EOL, '<br />', $output);