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https://github.com/joakim666/colortail

Like the tail command line utility but with colors
https://github.com/joakim666/colortail

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Like the tail command line utility but with colors

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README 

        

                                    Colortail

                                       0.3



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This software is Copyright (C) 2009 by Joakim Ek 

. I accept no responsibility for any damage this 

software may or may not do to your system - you use it completely at your 

own risk. This software comes under the GPL license. See the COPYING file 

for full legal details.

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This file contains:



  1. Overview

  2. Background

  3. Features

  4. Installing

  5. Usage

  6. Standard disclaimer

  7. Bugs

  8. Thanks



1. OVERVIEW



Colortail works like tail but can optionally read one or more config files

where it's specified which patterns results in which colors.



Colortail uses regular expressions (see regex(7)) to determine which lines and 

parts of lines to print in which colors.



2. BACKGROUND



My thoughts about colortail started when I was running a 

tail -f -q /var/log/foo /var/log/bar in the background of my irc session and I

wanted to quickly see if something strange was going on. I wanted different

lines in different colors so it's easy to see what is happening. I searched on

the internet but didn't find any program that did what I wanted. So I started

to code on colortail. Version 0.1 didn't use regular expressions but instead 

had a somewhat DOSish config format with '*' and '?'. In 0.2 I changed to

regular expressions. After 0.2 I didn't do much with colortail for a long

while, but then I got a patch, that made it possible to print just parts of

lines in a color, I got some new inspiration but because the code was a big

mess I decided to do a rewrite in C++. I like the modularity that the C++

classes "forces" one to do. And because I've been brainwashed with Java in

school I find the object view the most natural.



3. FEATURES



OK, so what is this colortail thing good for?



I can't say that colortail is a substitute for tail, not yet anyway. Right

now colortail lacks some major features the tail has. But I'll add this 

features in the next releases.



BUT, colortail has something that tail lacks. The ability to do colored output.

How may this come in handy? Well, it's mostly useful then looking at log files

(it's what I use it for anyway, it may very well be other uses for it as well,

if you have found something that colortail is useful for please send a mail 

telling me of it). In the case of looking at log files I have configured

colortail to do this:

(standard log file made my syslog (/var/log/messages)):



(I split the line)



Aug  4 23:14:53 morrdusk kernel: Packet log: ppp-in DENY ppp0 PROTO=6 

[-1--] [--2---] [--3---] [--4--] [---5-----] [-----6--------] [--5--]



xxx.xx.xxx.xxx:xxxxx xxx.xxx.x.xxx:xx L=44 S=0x00 I=58022 F=0x4000 T=53

[-----7------][--5-] [------7-----][----------------5-----------------]



The above is colorized as this:

The [-1-] part is in magenta

The [-2-] part is in cyan

The [-3-] part is in green

The [-4-] part is in yellow

The [-5-] part is in brightblue

The [-6-] part is in brightred

The [-7-] part is in brightyellow



It may be hard to imagine how it looks but I think it looks better than the

all white output from tail. And I like to have all the more serious things 

colored in bright red color. It then only takes a glance to see that

something has happened and one can take a closer look at that line. I also have

all ip addresses in bright yellow so that they are easy to see.



This is in no way hardcoded, all is controlled in the configuration files. 

That can be one configuration file for each tail file then tailing more than 

one file or if only one configuration file is given it's used as a global

configuration file, affecting all the tail files.



4. INSTALLING



Colortail should work on most unix system that have g++. I have developed it

on a Redhat linux system. 

I have integrated a bsd patch I got for 0.2 but I may have added some 

strange code in the rewrite that bsd doesn't like.

There shouldn't be a problem on other systems, but if you have to change

something to get it to work on your system, please send me a patch.



To install colortail this should be enough:

From the toplevel colortail source tree directory:

  ./configure

  make

  su

  make install



After that you may want to copy and edit the example config files to some

other place. I have them in ~/.colortail/



If you don't have the GNU regex library, it can be found at

ftp.funet.fi/pub/gnu/prep/regex/



5. USAGE



Most options are easily understanded. The only somewhat strange option is

the -k option that specifies the config files so colortail knows what should

be printed in which color. 



If only one config file and one or more tail files is given the config file 

is treated as a global one, i.e.



colortail -k conf.global file1 file2 file3



Multiple config files are separated with a , and if one tail file shouldn't

have a config file just leave it blank, i.e.



colortail -k conf.file1,,conf.file3 file1 file2 file3



6. STANDARD DISCLAIMER



The author don't take any responsibility for any damage this program may do.

I'm doing this in my spare time. If you don't like this program don't use it.



7. BUGS



Please read the BUGS file. There I describe a very annoying bug that exists

in tail too. I haven't yet found anyway to fix this.

It you have a solution to that problem or if you have found another bug,

please send a mail to [email protected]



8. THANKS



Thanks to:

Joey Hess for multicolored lines patch.

Nic Bellamy for FreeBSD and OpenBSD compatability patch.

Edward Betts for making debian packages.

Justin Piszcz for extensive 64-bit testing.