Is there an easy way to do something like tail -f mylogfile
but to have the changes of more than one file displayed (maybe with the file name added as prefix to each line)? Or maybe a GUI tool? I am running Debian.
3 Answers
Have you tried tail -f file1 file2
? It appears to do exactly what you want, at least on my FreeBSD machine. Perhaps the tail
that comes with a Debian system can do it too?
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2
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13I usually use
-F
instead since a number of files may get truncated as I'm restarting server programs.– ArcegeDec 4, 2012 at 23:37 -
16My new favorite parameter combo is
tail -qF *.log
:-q
to hide the file names and-F
, as Arcege pointed out, to lettail
follow the name rather than the descriptor because my log files are being rotated. Oct 4, 2016 at 10:26 -
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There is a limit to this. I have a folder with log files by PID for a worker that gets started for every new job in a queue (So lots of PIDs). If I
tail -f /var/log/folder/*
it returns the error "unable to execute /usr/bin/tail: Argument list too long" May 18, 2018 at 16:20
For some reason, answers along the lines of tail -f file1 file2
wasn't quite what I had in mind.
I want to know what happened in several logs sort of most recently 'locally', regardless of the global chronological order.
To do that, I used something more like watch -n1 tail -n10 file1 file2
For the exercise i wrote small node utility that does the same thing as tail -f f1 f2 f3
Splex:
https://www.npmjs.com/package/splex
The main "upgrade" is that lines are color coded per file name, and that you can have table-like interface.
Another improvemtn, actually main reason I wrote this, is the ability to have .splexrc.json files in different folders, so instead having to type tail -f f1 f2 f3
in one folder, then different files in other, you can write .splexrc.json file in root of your project and just type splex
without file list arguments and it automatically stream relevant logs you enumerated in config file.
multitail
is the king there. See Combine input from multiple files/pipes without clobbering lines or blocking?