Comments on: Nifty Log Watching Command

By: Dave

Dave — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 17:52:37 +0000

Seems like mtail doesn’t recurse through sub-directories to find log files like my command does, nor is it available in Debian stable’s repository (looks like Gentoo has it though).

Also, my example *can* do multiple directories. Just toss them in after the “find” command, like this:

find /var/log /var/spool/mail /home/user/log | xargs file | grep text | cut -f 1 -d : | xargs tail -F

Also, what does mtail do if you accidentally feed it a .gz file like your command above did? (e.g., /var/log/foo.log.1.gz) Does it spew binary characters all over your terminal like the normal tail command does?

–Dave

By: Harley Pig

Harley Pig — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 08:17:36 +0000

There is an app called mtail which does effectively the same thing. One improvement over your example is that you can use multiple directories:

mtail /var/log/* /var/spool/mail/harleypig /home/harleypig/log/*

By: Byron Clark

Byron Clark — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 17:56:38 +0000

You may want to change the ‘tail -f’ to ‘tail -F’ so that you’ll still follow a log file if it is rotated.