Subject: Re: tail follow multiple files?
To: Sean Davis <dive-nb@endersgame.net>
From: Alistair Crooks <agc@pkgsrc.org>
List: tech-userlevel
Date: 07/03/2005 11:33:52
On Sat, Jul 02, 2005 at 12:59:06PM -0400, Sean Davis wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 02, 2005 at 08:53:12AM -0700, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
> > David Laight <david@l8s.co.uk> writes:
> > 
> > > Since tail only processes a single file at a time, tail -f on multple
> > > files just doesn't make sense.
> > > If you want the merged output from many files just run multiple copies
> > > of tail -f in the background....
> > 
> > The GNU/Linux implementation of tail -f with multiple files (which I
> > wrote many years ago) is more convenient, because it announces each
> > time it switches to showing a new file.
> > 
> > I often use it to tail a whole set of log files.
> 
> You can also do this with xtail, from pkgsrc. One of these days I'd like to
> mod it to use kqueue, but I haven't had time.

FWIW, I modified root-tail in pkgsrc to check for log-file rotation, too,
and that's been working fine for me for years.

Regards,
Alistair