MultiTail - a versatile logfile viewer

Introduction

MultiTail ( http://www.vanheusden.com/multitail/ ) lets you view one or multiple files like the original tail program. The difference is that it creates multiple windows on your console (with ncurses). It can also monitor wildcards: if another file matching the wildcard has a more recent modification date, it will automatically switch to that file. That way you can, for example, monitor a complete directory of files. Merging of 2 or even more logfiles is possible. It can also use colors while displaying the logfiles (through regular expressions), for faster recognition of what is important and what not. It can also filter lines (again with regular expressions). It has interactive menus for editing given regular expressions and deleting and adding windows. One can also have windows with the output of shell scripts and other software. When viewing the output of external software, MultiTail can mimic the functionality of tools like 'watch' and such.

Detailed Description

For Motion, MultiTail has a color scheme for its syslog output. E.g.: multitail -cS syslog -cS motion /var/log/messages will add a generic syslog color scheme and motion-specific colors to the logging.

Installation

One needs multitail 5.0.0 which will be released somewhere in April 2007. Preview-versions (or just the colorscheme) can be requested via e-mail: folkert@vanheusden.com

Comments and Bug Reports

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