Stop using tail -f (mostly)
brianstorti.com
Stop using tail -f (mostly)
1–10 of 211 posts
Re: Stop using tail -f (mostly)
#2Good share! Command line fu is always nice.
Re: Stop using tail -f (mostly)
#3I just tried this on an extremely active logfile and it didn't work very well for me. I'd recommend multitail for watching constantly changing files.
Re: Stop using tail -f (mostly)
#4tail works best for me. I'm not going stop using it just because a person on the internet says not to.
Re: Stop using tail -f (mostly)
#5I use tail -f and when I need to search, I use iTerm's search (Cmd+F) which highlights matches and even supports regex. I also have an unlimited scroll buffer so I can just scroll up or down to get the context of a particular match.
Re: Stop using tail -f (mostly)
#6Or use multitail. It supports syntax highlighting, among other features: http://www.vanheusden.com/multitail/
Re: Stop using tail -f (mostly)
#7tail works best for me. I'm not going stop using it just because a person on the internet says not to.
The title is a bit clickbaity, but ignore that and it's a useful tip you might not know. The author doesn't actually demand you stop using tail -f if you like it better.
Re: Stop using tail -f (mostly)
#8This _almost_ touches on the useful part of this:
If you search in less and then put it in follow mode, it continues to highlight the search terms. This is very useful for trapping an exception or webcall in the wild.
The downside: less buffers and tail -f prints directly. On a slow printing log this can cause events to show up slowly, and can cause performance issues on a fast moving log. If you're piping through a script for processing, tail -f is still the best bet. If you need multiple files, multitail is probably better. less +F hits a quick+easy operational niche and is available almost everywhere (whereas multitail is not).
Re: Stop using tail -f (mostly)
#9Even when you don't want less +F, a good alternative to tail -f is tail -F. It survives log rotation, and the file being temporarily inaccessible:
--retry
keep trying to open a file even if it is inaccessible when tail
starts or if it becomes inaccessible later; useful when follow-
ing by name, i.e., with --follow=name
-F same as --follow=name --retryRe: Stop using tail -f (mostly)
#10I use tail -f and when I need to search, I use iTerm's search (Cmd+F) which highlights matches and even supports regex. I also have an unlimited scroll buffer so I can just scroll up or down to get the context of a particular match.
That only works if you only care about search results since you started tailing. If you want to search for what happened before you started tailing, you need to stop tailing and use less/grep/etc.