Colortail
0.3This file contains:
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.
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.
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.
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/
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
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.
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 joakim@pjek.se
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.