Who is writing to file? Maybe you don't need to read the file, but the lines that are written by the process.
But if the files closes and then someone else tries to append something else to that file with a new writer then if you don't remember what was written by the first writer then you would have to read the file.

Perhaps if you explain your problem better you would get a better answer, but checking the RandomAccessFile class might be a good place to start.

There is a game called NeverwinterNights that prints all of the data to a log file in a form such as and i am looking to read this data from the file (named nwnlogfile1.txt) as it is written. i have no idea how i would go about capturing the data as it is written by the process.

TJ