Tail command -f on all files excluding a file

Question

I want to run tail -f command on all the file in a directory except one file in that directory. Can somebody suggest me a way of doing it thanks.

Answer 1

       ls | grep -v unwanted | xargs tail -f

Answer 2

You could also use the exec flag with find to give you a nice cohesive one liner:

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f ! -name unwanted.txt -exec tail -f {} +

You can also play around with the -maxdepth flag if you want to go more than the current directory in depth or omit it completely if you wanted to recurse through the current directory and all sub directories.

You can also add other excluded files by using the -a flag like so:

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f ! -name unwanted.txt -a -type f ! -name unwanted2.txt -exec tail -f {} +

However that could get a little tedious for an extended amount of files.