Multitail • Hacker News Board

One of the nice things about lnav is that it indexes the log messages by time and shows a combined view of all the files that are loaded. Other features include: automatic handling of compressed files, querying logs using SQL, a histogram view of messages over time, and more...

Re: Multitail

#14

Post by mulligan » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 6:06 PM UTC

We built a multitail functionality back in the day, but we built it on top of a general purpose shell script to do things across multiple machines that we called multido: https://github.com/mochi/miscscripts/blob/master/cmultido

Re: Multitail

#15

Post by alazar » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 6:51 PM UTC

I was looking at multitail yesterday. The problem that I'm trying to solve is I follow multiple files using 'find /var/log -type f -mtime -1 | xargs tail -F' while I'm troubleshooting something, and then need to re-assemble them into one stanza per file rather than the sequential output from tail. I've been doing this manually in a text editor; does anyone have a better solution?

Re: Multitail

#16

Post by Nickoladze » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 7:02 PM UTC

tenfingers wrote: post #9

Nothing related to multitail per-se, but: dark blue on black is unreadable. With a lighter blue might be ok, but please don't supply defaults like that.

It likely depends on your terminal colors.

Re: Multitail

#17

Post by taylodl » Thu, Mar 13, 2014, 8:00 PM UTC

emacs auto-revert-tail-mode

You can tail as many files as you want.

Re: Multitail

#18

Post by tenfingers » Fri, Mar 14, 2014, 2:02 PM UTC

Nickoladze wrote: post #16

tenfingers wrote: post #9

Nothing related to multitail per-se, but: dark blue on black is unreadable. With a lighter blue might be ok, but please don't supply defaults like that.

It likely depends on your terminal colors.

Indeed, but look at the screenshots themselves. This is not something I would "show".

Re: Multitail

#19

Post by zerd » Fri, Mar 14, 2014, 11:44 PM UTC

tstack wrote: post #13

Another terminal-based log file viewer with a large feature set is lnav: http://lnav.org/ One of the nice things about lnav is that it indexes the log messages by time and shows a combined view of all the files that are loaded. Other features include: automatic handling of compressed files, querying logs using SQL, a histogram view of messages over time, and more...

Thank you for suggesting this. This looks exactly like what I've been looking for. Like a "command-line splunk". It is also packaged as a staticly linked file, which makes deployment easy for us.

Re: Multitail

#20

Post by santiagolizardo » Sun, Mar 16, 2014, 10:32 AM UTC

Is not for the terminal, but it is a multiplatform multitail with highlighter that you might find handy if are running a graphical UI: http://sourceforge.net/projects/beobachter Disclaimer: I'm the developer behind the project.