MultiTail lets you view one or multiple files like the original tail program. MultiTail started as an attempt to provide a program which would display two log files in a split screen. It was originally a clone of wtail.
The difference is that this program creates multiple windows on your console (with ncurses). It can also use colors while displaying the logfiles for faster recognizing which lines are important and which are not.
The application is optimized for terminal-sessions through slow links.
Features include:
- A very powerful and versatile tool.
- Monitor wildcards – if another file matching the wildcard has a more recent modification date, it will automatically switch to that file. This allows monitoring a complete directory of files.
- Merge 2 or more log files.
- Use colours while displaying the logfiles (using regular expressions).
- Selections with regular expressions.
- Selection on field-number/string offset.
- Color schemes can be defined in a configuration file. A couple of examples have been included (Postfix, Apache, RSStail, Acctail, WTMPtail, Squid, Asterisk, Sendmail, Mailscanner, Samba, Exim, HTTPing, TCPdump, ISC-DHCPD, Bind, Smartmontools, Kerberos, NTPd, nagtail, WebSphere (SystemErr), NNTPcache, Veritas Netbackup procmail, Checkpoint Firewall-1, Netscape directory server (LDAP), log4j, ClamAV, p0f, sysstat, portsentry, pppd, strace, Linux firewall (netfilter) logging, Argus, Snort, Motion, IBM AIX errpt, MySQL error log, BOINC, acpitail, netstat) – easily extensible.
- Default color scheme for certain files can be selected in the configuration file (using regular expressions (NOT wildcards!))
- External scripts can be used to determine what colors to use where in the logged lines.
- Use of colors can be switched off.
- Filtering of lines (through regular expressions).
- Interactive menus for editing regular expressions and adding windows.
- Mimicking the functionality of tools such as watch when viewing the output of external software.
Website: github.com/thobbs/multitail-curses
Support:
Developer: Folkert van Heusden
License: GNU General Public License v2.0
MultiTail is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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