Re: tail --recursive

[Jim Meyering]

Simon Windows <address@hidden> wrote:
> Jim Meyering wrote:
>> Thanks for the contribution.
>> I haven't looked at it at all yet,
>> but wonder if you've considered using inotify?
>> That seems like that mechanism would be much more appropriate,
>> when tailing many files in an arbitrary hierarchy.
>>
>> There are already a couple of inotify(7)-based versions
>> of tail.  I see one that's called inotail.
>
> I hadn't considered inotify, to be honest I wasn't aware of it.
>
>> One of the most important parts of a new-feature suggestion
>> is the justification for it.  Why is your feature needed?
>> And can it be made robust?  I.e., what if there are more files
>> in the hierarchy than the maximum number of open file descriptors?
>
> I wanted it to monitor the output of a folder of log files and tail -f
> <dir>/* would not give me new files. A good example would be monitoring
> /var/log on a system that uses logrotate. tail -rf /var/log would
> satisfy this.
>
> I haven't put any additional features in to make it robust aside from
> checking return values to prevent a segfault. What would you suggest?

Look at iwatch?
http://iwatch.sourceforge.net/

>From its man page:

USAGE EXAMPLES
       % iwatch /tmp
              Monitor changes in /tmp directory with default events.

       % iwatch -r -e access,create -m address@hidden -x /etc/mail /etc
              Monitor only access and create events in /etc  directory  recur-
              sively  with  /etc/mail as exception and send email notification
              to address@hidden

       % iwatch -r -c (w;ps -ef)|mail -s '%f was changed' address@hidden /bin
              Monitor /bin directory recursively and execute the command.

       % iwatch -r -X '.svn' ~/projects
              Monitor ~/projects directory recursively, but exclude  any  .svn
              directories inside. This can't be done with a normal '-x' option
              since '-x' can only exclude the defined path.