RE: Question Re: Piping and Redirection

["Dennis Lovelady" <dlovelady@xxxxxxxx>]

That would be cool, Zak.

The first problem I see (certainly not insurmountable) is that it might be
needed for monitoring message queues... or for data files ... or for data
queues and on and on, so it's source of input would have to be extremely
flexible.  Having solved that issue, the second issue comes into play, and
that is one of usefulness.  It really comes back to the issue of piping,
not of the tail command itself.  If this "tail400" utility were to exists,
would you then have to write applications that emulate grep and awk, sed,
less/more and all the other unix utilities so that you could realize the
command's usefulness?  Or would it be another application that has the
options of OUTPUT(* | *PRINT | *OUTFILE) ....  ?

Not to demean your good idea, but just to put things into a little
different perspective.

Dennis





"Metz, Zak" <Zak_Metz@G1.com>@midrange.com on 11/21/2002 09:48:39 AM

Please respond to midrange-l@midrange.com

Sent by:    midrange-l-admin@midrange.com


To:    <midrange-l@midrange.com>
cc:
Subject:    RE: Question Re: Piping and Redirection


Reading this debate day in and day out has be thinking about writing a damn
tail program. There's no question that it could be done. Perhaps a first
pass would be a message queue monitor that updates automatically and
dynamically adjusts filtering to the user's specifications. Next step, a DB
monitor?

-----Original Message-----
From: James Rich [mailto:james@eaerich.com]
Sent: Wednesday, November 20, 2002 5:43 PM
To: midrange-l@midrange.com
Subject: RE: Question Re: Piping and Redirection


On Thu, 21 Nov 2002, Evan Harris wrote:

> I'm still mystified as to why you would want to watch the log files.
Seems
> to me that constantly watching them would be more disruptive than getting
a
> break message  - especially when you can't easily filter the log by a
> severity level. Or can you ?

When using tail to monitor files (log files or any other file) you can
filter what you want by piping with grep:

tail -f /my/file | grep "string to watch for"

James Rich