tail and the rolling log

August 7, 2006 3:07 PM

Is there a tail-like program for rolling logfiles?

I have a server process which produces a file server.log, which I use "tail -f server.log" to view as it's being written. Unfortunately for me, the program eventually rolls the current server.log file over to a server.log.mmddyy naming scheme, and starts a new server.log. There is no trailer written to the logfile before the rollover occurs, so I can sometimes end up wasting time looking at a stale tail, thinking my process is running slowly, when it's just moved on to another log file. Does anyone know of a smarter tail-like program that could handle this issue?

posted by nomisxid to technology (2 comments total)

The tail that is part of the GNU textutils package has a '-F' flag that will handle such file replacements.
posted by jimw at 3:14 PM on August 7, 2006

It's actually part of coreutils. textutils, fileutils, and sh-utils all merged into a single package coreutils some years ago.

But that doesn't matter to the question at hand.
posted by Rhomboid at 4:14 PM on August 7, 2006