I'm writing a log file viewer for a web application and for that I want to paginate through the lines of the log file. The items in the file are line based with the newest item on the bottom.

So I need a tail() method that can read n lines from the bottom and supports an offset. What I came up with looks like this:

def tail(f, n, offset=0):
    """Reads a n lines from f with an offset of offset lines."""
    avg_line_length = 74
    to_read = n + offset
    while 1:
        try:
            f.seek(-(avg_line_length * to_read), 2)
        except IOError:
            # woops.  apparently file is smaller than what we want
            # to step back, go to the beginning instead
            f.seek(0)
        pos = f.tell()
        lines = f.read().splitlines()
        if len(lines) >= to_read or pos == 0:
            return lines[-to_read:offset and -offset or None]
        avg_line_length *= 1.3

Is this a reasonable approach? What is the recommended way to tail log files with offsets?