How to monitor a windows log file in real time?

Solution 1:

There's also an equivalent to "tail -f" under Windows, if you have PowerShell installed:

type -wait

Solution 2:

I use Notepad++ as my default text editor on all my systems, and it has the nice bonus of having this built-in - just go Plugins -> Document Monitor -> Start to monitor. You can also use File -> Reload from disk to manually reload it.

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Solution 3:

You don't mention which platform you're using, but on Unix-like systems the tail command does this:

tail -f /var/log/messages

In fact there are implementations of tail for Windows also (eg. unxutils).

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Solution 4:

If windows is your thing you could try Tail for Win32.

edit: Another alternative I just found is TailXP. It's free, but not opensource. Looks ok from the description but I haven't tried it.

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Solution 5:

Actually, Log-Expert does what you want, plus a lot of nice feature