Multitail | Hacker News Reader

Multitail

vanheusden.com

42 pointsnapolux19 comments

Another terminal-based log file viewer with a large feature set is lnav:

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.

The best feature of MultiTail is that allows following original file names by specifying '-f' flag. Really useful for switching automatically to the needed file after log rotation.

BSD/GNU tail do that with -F.

Good tool, have been using this for ages. Just don't look at the source code, at least a few years ago when I tried that to fix a bug I encountered, it gave me eye-cancer :P

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?

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

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.

Looks very useful, thanks for posting. I'll try using it instead of tail over the next few weeks.

Have been using this for ages too with fping: http://imagebin.ca/v/1FO4anUn0zyF

There's also something similar in Python

https://github.com/thobbs/multitail-curses

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".

I use multitail's --mergeall flag daily for stuff like: multitail --mergeall /var/log/apache2/*error.log

I use to use Multitail.

Now: TMux, I just have a session in TMux and just attach to the session wehn I need to. Works great.

I use this a lot for monitoring my home server, really nice tool, especially the colors.

It's a good tool indeed, but I hate how, when pressing enter to add a delimiter to a big file, the screen starts to flicker.

emacs auto-revert-tail-mode

You can tail as many files as you want.

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