How to start tailing a file that has not been yet created

Question

I use tail to monitor the progress of jobs that I know will write their progress to disk. Almost always, I know which file they will create before they start running (the jobs are dispatched by a scheduler on a supercomputer)

Is there a way to tail these files before they are created? I would like to do so while avoiding race conditions and/or making assumptions about how or when the jobs write to disk.

Answer 1

Use the -F flag to tail (assuming you have tail from GNU coreutils):

tail -F file-that-does-not-exist