Swatch (Simple Log Watcher) is designed to monitor system activity. Swatch started out as the “simple watchdog” for actively monitoring log files produced by UNIX’s syslog facility. It has since evolved into a handy utility that can monitor just about any type of log.
A typical action is echoing the matched line in a variety of colours and formats including reverse video, bold, underline, and normal, which swatch knows how to do internally. Other actions include sending mail or executing an arbitrary program on the line.
Swatch is written in Perl and uses Perl regular expressions for line matching. In order for Swatch to be useful, it requires a configuration file which contains pattern(s) to look for and action(s) to perform when each pattern is found.
Features include:
- Simple to configure.
- Regular expression matching.
- Highlighting.
- Hooks.
- Send e-mails based on matching log strings.
- Execute in the background.
Website: sourceforge.net/projects/swatch
Support: Forum
Developer: Todd Atkins
License: GNU General Public License v2.0
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