Hide

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again.

Delete that bloated snippets file you've been using and share your personal repository with the world. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.

If you have a new feature suggestion or find a bug, please get in touch via http://commandlinefu.uservoice.com/

Get involved!

You can sign-in using OpenID credentials, or register a traditional username and password.

OpenID
or
Sign in Register

First-time OpenID users will be automatically assigned a username which can be changed after signing in.

Hide

Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning, there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu3
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu10

Subscribe to the feeds.

Use your favourite RSS aggregator to stay in touch with the latest commands. There are feeds mirroring the 3 Twitter streams as well as for virtually every other subset (users, tags, functions,…):

Subscribe to the feed for:

Hide

News

2011-03-12 - Confoo 2011 presentation
Slides are available from the commandlinefu presentation at Confoo 2011: http://presentations.codeinthehole.com/confoo2011/
2011-01-04 - Moderation now required for new commands
To try and put and end to the spamming, new commands require moderation before they will appear on the site.
2010-12-27 - Apologies for not banning the trolls sooner
Have been away from the interwebs over Christmas. Will be more vigilant henceforth.
2010-09-24 - OAuth and pagination problems fixed
Apologies for the delay in getting Twitter's OAuth supported. Annoying pagination gremlin also fixed.
Hide

Tags

Hide

Functions

Hide

Credits

Site by David Winterbottom (user root).

Monitor logs in Linux using Tail

Terminal - Monitor logs in Linux using Tail
find /var/log -type f -exec file {} \; | grep 'text' | cut -d' ' -f1 | sed -e's/:$//g' | grep -v '[0-9]$' | xargs tail -f
2009-06-03 09:47:08
User: mohan43u
Functions: cut file find grep sed tail xargs
5
Up
Down
Monitor logs in Linux using Tail

Works in Ubuntu, I hope it will work on all Linux machines. For Unixes, tail should be capable of handling more than one file with '-f' option.

This command line simply take log files which are text files, and not ending with a number, and it will continuously monitor those files.

Putting one alias in .profile will be more useful.

Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Alternatives

There are 3 alternatives - vote for the best!

Terminal - Alternatives

Know a better way?

If you can do better, submit your command here.

What others think

I've always wondered if I could tail more than one file. Can you break down each command and say what exactly is going on here?

Comment by Scott 207 weeks ago

In the long term, if you find this kind of consolidated log useful, consider changing your log settings to give you that in the first place.

Comment by citybadger 207 weeks ago

@Scott find is a generic tool for searching a path for files that match rules you specify and then possibly taking action. Here we are finding normal files (not directories) in /var/log (where log files live) and running 'file' on each of them which spits out the filename along with a description of file's guess as to each filetype. The grep|cut|set|grep combo just filters the text down to the filenames of actual text files, and, and then the xargs part just runs one instance of tail on all the resulting filenames. If you're on a unix system, you could test this on your system. To see the effect of each command just start with the 'find' part and then start tacking on the succeeding piped commands one by one. Don't forget to check the man pages too: 'man find', 'man file', etc.

Comment by bwoodacre 207 weeks ago

@bwoodacre, thanks for the explanation, I should have explained at first. I'll be happy if someone says, "Hey, its monitoring my ssh logs, apache logs, php logs, mysql logs etc.,". I didn't install them in my old machine.

Comment by mohan43u 206 weeks and 6 days ago

Very neat command, I like it :) Thanks.

Comment by Weboide 206 weeks and 6 days ago

You can also replace tail with inotail which will reduce the load. (because inotail uses inotify which is a kernel feature to get notified of file changes)

Comment by Weboide 206 weeks and 6 days ago

grep, cut. sed and then grep again. Why not just sed?

find /var/log -type f -exec file {} \; | sed -n '/text/ s/[^0-9]:.*//p' | xargs tail -f
Comment by unixmonkey8119 86 weeks and 3 days ago

Your point of view

You must be signed in to comment.

Related sites and podcasts