logtailer: Watching the logs in real time

I mentioned a couple of log utilities a long time ago, not least among them were multitail and lnav.

Here’s another, which you probably haven’t heard of: logtailer.

logtailer is a tiny little program that does only one small thing, and yet with that screenshot I can’t really show the utility of it.

See, logtailer just watches logs for updates, and spits the information on the screen.

Label and list as many logs as you like, and whenever an event occurs, it will pop up within logtailer, separated and labeled like you can see above.

Maybe that’s not the coolest thing you ever saw, but it’s remarkably simple and efficient. Very Unixy, if I can say that.

If you need to watch several logs at once but don’t have the resources for something like multitail, give this a try.