This is scroller. It was designed to allow me to view status on my Amanda (http://www.amanda.org) backups, but it is extensible enough I decided to release it as free software.
Scroller takes two parameters. The first is the number of seconds to wait between runs. The second is the command to run. It is run with popen(), so shell expressions are valid. If you want to watch the top of a file instead of a program, just have it run "cat filename". Note that although it will only display the top portion, it will still allow cat to run the whole way through. So if your file is really big you might use head instead.
Scroller uses ncurses to optimize the screen drawing. This means that your TERM enviornment variable must be set correctly, or you'll get garbage. I believe that if ncurses can't figure out what kind of display you have, it'll just redraw the whole thing each time.
Install should be fairly straightforward, just type "make install".
There are alse SRPMS availible. If you are starting with an SRPM and would like to install this on your system, then do rpm --rebuild <source RPM>. This will compile and install the resultant RPM, without leaving any mess in /usr/src/redhat. Alternatively you could just install the binary RPM to begin with. :b
If you have any patches, fixes, etc., just send 'em on over to vectro@scroller.sourceforge.net.