What is the purpose of using the tail command in the terminal?

The tail command in the terminal is used to display the last few lines of a file. By default, it shows the last 10 lines, but you can specify a different number of lines to display. It's commonly used for monitoring log files or output files to see the most recent entries.

Here’s a basic usage example:

tail filename.txt

To display a specific number of lines, you can use the -n option:

tail -n 20 filename.txt

This command will show the last 20 lines of filename.txt.