Tailing a file - followtail behavior

[Chris_Olson]

If I engage followtail on the inputs.conf, does the application only follow the logs on all restarts, or only on the first time that individual log is examined? The request is that we turn off splunk during our load tests and when we turn back on that splunk ignore what was reported during the load time.

In other words the desired behavior is for Splunk to only look at new data when restarted. Is this possible?

[gkanapathy]

It only takes effect the very first time a file is seen, and has no effect afterwards. I suppose you could try to clean out the fishbucket (which records the file pointers) in between restarts, which I believe will also reset the followTail to start at the end of every file, since every file then will be considered "new" or seen for the first time.

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Update: It is true that followTail only takes effect the first time it sees a specific file. However, this does not mean a specific file name, but rather any new file even with a name that has been seen before. In particular, if you roll a log file, it is consider a new file, and followTail will jump to the end of that new file.

[yannK]

please check this answer about the misleading option followtail.
http://splunk-base.splunk.com/answers/57819/when-is-it-appropriate-to-set-followtail-to-true