How to 'tail' a logfile, X lines at a time

Question

I have a logfile that is generating hundreds of lines per second – say, 12 specific lines, 16× per sec.
I want to run either a command-line or a shell script that can display this logfile neatly in real-time.  But if I run tail -f logfile.txt, the text rapidly scrolls off the terminal window and can't be read by human eyes.  I haven't yet mastered the command line so this is all I can think of doing right now.
I want the terminal window to just print 12 lines at a time and automatically refresh, something like:
// while ( Ctrl+C hasn't been hit )
// {
//   clear terminal window
//   print last 12 lines of logfile.txt
//   wait until logfile is 12 lines longer
// }

Any ideas?
EDIT: it turns out I can do tail -f logfile.txt and just set the terminal window height to 12.  This gets me pretty close to what I want, but it seems like a "naive" approach.  Hoping somebody has a more elegant solution.

roaima · Answer

You can view the last N lines at a M second interval using watch. Assuming N=20 and M=3,
watch -n3 tail -n20 logfile.txt

Obviously you'll lose great chunks of output as the update interval exceeds the write interval, but as far as I understand it this is what you want.

Scott S · Answer

tail -f logfile.txt | less

And you can use the interface glenn jackman highlighted to move about:

F to follow
Ctrl-C to stop following
q to quit
/ to search for regular expressions

glenn jackman · Answer

I like to use less for looking at logs. Some useful less commands:

G to jump down to the last line
R to refresh the file (followed after by G)
F to tail the file in real time (aka tail -f): hit Ctrl+C to stop tailing.

Artem S. Tashkinov · Answer

Bash >= 4 has a special built-in function mapfile:
tail -f logfile.txt | while mapfile -t -n 12 lines && ((${#lines[@]})); do
    clear
    printf '%sn' "${lines[@]}"
    sleep 0.1 # Might be necessary or you won't see anything at all except the last batch of lines
done

Adopted from: Read n lines at a time using Bash.

How to 'tail' a logfile, X lines at a time

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