logtop: Kind of like a *top … for a logs

I’m not a log nut. I mean, I don’t spend hours poring over logs to try and find the source of my angst (I’m not a terribly angsty person though).

I do know that’s a favorite hobby for some people and professions, and to that end, logtop may be exciting.

logtop is kind of like a *top, if it makes sense to watch a log continually for updates and changes. And as the author suggests, using logtop in this sense

tail -f /var/log/pacman.log | ./logtop

is much the same as doing this

watch 'tail /var/log/pacman.log | sort | uniq -c | sort -gr'

Bt you could say that equating logtop to that line means it’s not adding much to the classic black-and-white Unixy tools you probably already have.

And given that tail already has an -F flag for following log updates, it might not seem like logtop is actually an improvement.

My example doesn’t do much justice to logtop though, since it is prepared to handle much heavier and more dense log updates, as might happen with machines more powerful and active than my puny Pentium 4.

And given that logtop is prepared to calculate and show line rate stats and contort its output to follow specific formats, I’d be doing a great disservice to logtop by dismissing it out of hand.

But I’m not the best judge of these things, since I already confessed that watching logs was something I do rarely at best. Those of you who find solace or salary in staring at logs … you are the target demographic here. 😉