How can I watch log messages as they are written?

Question

I am debugging a new application that is crashing. I want to watch the messages as they are being written to the log. What command should I use?

Answer 1

If you're on a unixy system and your log is a file, you want tail -f <filename>.

If you're on a Windows system, there are ports of tail available (hat tip - Dave Webb).

Answer 2

If you prefer GUI tools, jEdit has a Log Viewer plugin that may do what you need.

Answer 3

To add to Dominic's answer, if you're on a Windowsy system, you can get Cygwin32, which will give you a tail command for Windows. (And a bunch of other good stuff...)

Answer 4

$ tail -f log_file_name &

This would keep running in the background.

Answer 5

If you are on Mac OS X, run Console (in /Applications/Utilities). It is a nice GUI for viewing and searching logs.

Answer 6

Try using baretail

It's a small executable that doesn't need to be installed and runs on Windows. It has a tabbed interface so you can have several different files open at once. You can also color code certain keywords in the logs. All in all, a very handy tool.

Answer 7

Install cygwin and utilities on Windows and run

tail -f ./logfile

Cygwin gives you a unix like interface on Windows and provides you with most of the utilities as present on unix