How to tail -f the latest log file with a given pattern
I haven't tested this, but an approach that may work would be to run a background process that creates and updates a symlink to the latest log file and then you would tail -f
(or tail -F
) the symlink.
I believe the simplest solution is as follows:
tail -f `ls -tr | tail -n 1`
Now, if your directory contains other log files like "SystemLog" and you only want the latest "SoftwareLog" file, then you would simply include a grep as follows:
tail -f `ls -tr | grep SoftwareLog | tail -n 1`
[Edit: after a quick googling for a tool]
You might want to try out multitail - http://www.vanheusden.com/multitail/
If you want to stick with Dennis Williamson's answer (and I've +1'ed him accordingly) here are the blanks filled in for you.
In your shell, run the following script (or it's zsh equivalent, I whipped this up in bash before I saw the zsh tag):
#!/bin/bash
TARGET_DIR="some/logfiles/"
SYMLINK_FILE="SoftwareLog.latest"
SYMLINK_PATH="$TARGET_DIR/$SYMLINK_FILE"
function getLastModifiedFile {
echo $(ls -t "$TARGET_DIR" | grep -v "$SYMLINK_FILE" | head -1)
}
function getCurrentlySymlinkedFile {
if [[ -h $SYMLINK_PATH ]]
then
echo $(ls -l $SYMLINK_PATH | awk '{print $NF}')
else
echo ""
fi
}
symlinkedFile=$(getCurrentlySymlinkedFile)
while true
do
sleep 10
lastModified=$(getLastModifiedFile)
if [[ $symlinkedFile != $lastModified ]]
then
ln -nsf $lastModified $SYMLINK_PATH
symlinkedFile=$lastModified
fi
done
Background that process using the normal method (again, I don't know zsh, so it might be different)...
./updateSymlink.sh 2>&1 > /dev/null
Then tail -F $SYMLINK_PATH
so that the tail hands the changing of the symbolic link or a rotation of the file.
This is slightly convoluted, but I don't know of another way to do this with tail. If anyone else knows of a utility that handles this, then let them step forward because I'd love to see it myself too - applications like Jetty by default do logs this way and I always script up a symlinking script run on a cron to compensate for it.
[Edit: Removed an erroneous 'j' from the end of one of the lines. You also had a bad variable name "lastModifiedFile" didn't exist, the proper name that you set is "lastModified"]