I want to know how to tail a log file when lines in the files are updating(appending and removing)?
4 Answers
As Atari911 said, you can use watch
along with cat
to do this. Use
watch cat <filename>
this will output the contents of the file given by filename
every 2 seconds to standard output. To change the interval for updating the output to something like 1 second(you can't reduce beyond 0.1), you can use
watch -n 1 cat <filename>
I am using cat to output the complete file, you could tail but that would only give you the last n
lines of the file, where n
is 10 by default.
Refer to the manual page of watch for more info.
You might try:
tail -f /var/log/syslog
Or whatever file you are interested in. Get out of 'tail' with Ctrl+c.
-
-
1
-
You need to use the tail command which output the last part of files in real time including all incoming logs to a standard output device such as screen. the commadn to use is
tail -f /path/to/log/file
EDIT: TRY this
tail -f --retry /path-to-log-file
This will try to reopen the file with the new contents
Or this
tail -F /path/to/log/file
I'm not sure exactly what you are trying to do but you could use the watch
command in conjunction with the tail
command... Something like this:
watch tail /path/to/file