How to add date string to each line of a continuously written log file

With perl:

command 2>&1 | perl -pe 'print scalar(localtime()), " ";'

With gawk:

command 2>&1 | awk '{ print strftime(), $0; fflush() }'

Replace command with tail -f logfile for your specific example. Or, perhaps you could just redirect the original program's stdout/stderr to the above pipe.

Try

tail -f logfile | while read line; do echo `date` "$line" ; done

You can try this

cat /etc/motd | xargs -d"\n" -I {} date +"%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S {}"

Example output:

2013-02-26 15:13:57 
2013-02-26 15:13:57 The programs included with the Debian GNU/Linux system are free software;
2013-02-26 15:13:57 the exact distribution terms for each program are described in the
2013-02-26 15:13:57 individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright.
2013-02-26 15:13:57 
2013-02-26 15:13:57 Debian GNU/Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent
2013-02-26 15:13:57 permitted by applicable law.