This is what I did using tail command. When I try to output the file to screen the file is empty.~]$ tail > AFS2F1PASSES ALL DATA FROM INPUT TO OUTPUTPASSES ONLY SPECIFIED COLUMNSPASSES NUMBER OF SPECIFIED LINES AT BEGINNINGCOMBINES COLUMNSARRANGES DATA IN SEQUENCEPASSES NUMBER OF SPECIFIED LINES AT THE END OF DATATRANSLATES ONE OR MORE CHARACTERSDELETES DUPLICATE LINESCOUNTS CHARACTERS, WORDS, OR LINESABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZIs there anything wrong with the way I'm using tail command?
Using tail command to create a file
bash;tail
tail will only output the last 10 lines. So one way or another, you'll have to tell it you've finished typing so it knows what lines (the 10 last ones) to output.If you press CTRL-C (the default intr character on most systems) a SIGINT signal will be sent to it which will kill it. Because it had not seen the end of input by the time you killed it, it will not have had the opportunity to write anything yet, so it will die without having output anything.The terminal way to signify the end of input (when the terminal is in canonical mode) is to enter the eof character (by default Ctrl-D on most systems)  on an empty line.Then tail will detect that the end of input is being reached and will output the 10 last lines that it has received.