How to monitor a text file in realtime [closed]

Answer 1

To make the list complete here's a link to the GNU WIN32 ports of many useful tools (amongst them is tail). GNUWin32 CoreUtils

Answer 2

I second "tail -f" in cygwin. I assume that Tail for Win32 will accomplish the same thing.

Answer 3

Tail is the best answer so far.

If you don't use Windows, you probably already have tail.

If you do use Windows, you can get a whole slew of Unix command line tools from here. Unzip them and put them somewhere in your PATH.

Then just do this at the command prompt from the same folder your log file is in:

tail -n 50 -f whatever.log

This will show you the last 50 lines of the file and will update as the file updates.

You can combine grep with tail with great results - something like this:

tail -n 50 -f whatever.log | grep Error

gives you just lines with "Error" in it.

Good luck!

Answer 4

Just a shameless plug to tail onto the answer, but I have a free web based app called Hacksaw used for viewing log4net files. I've put in an auto refresh options so you can give yourself near real time updates without having to refresh the browser all the time.

Answer 5

I have used FileSystemWatcher for monitoring of text files for a component I recently built. There may be better options (I never found anything in my limited research) but that seemed to do the trick nicely :)

Crap, my bad, you're actually after a tool to do it all for you..

Well if you get unlucky and want to roll your own ;)

Answer 6

Try SMSTrace from Microsoft (now called CMTrace, and directly available in the Start Menu on some versions of Windows)

Its a brilliant GUI tool that monitors updates to any text file in real time, even if its locked for writing by another file.

Don't be fooled by the description, its capable of monitoring any file, including .txt, .log or .csv.

Its ability to monitor locked files is extremely useful, and is one of the reasons why this utility shines.

One of the nicest features is line coloring. If it sees the word "ERROR", the line becomes red. If it sees the word "WARN", the line becomes yellow. This makes the logs a lot easier to follow.