multitail — useful tool for dealing with apache

While configuring apache2 and subversion, I ran across the age old problem of needed to monitor both the access and error logs of apache.

A quick check of darwinports shows two promising entries:

% port list | grep tail
multitail sysutils/multitail 3.0.6  Tail multiple files in one terminal at once
xtail     sysutils/xtail     2.1    like 'tail -f' on a bunch of files at once

Google reveals that multitail would be more useful. Unfortunately, 3.0.6 is way out of date and doesn’t build via darwinports (or standalone). xtail works, though. No color which leads to a bit of verbosity, but works fine and is more convenient than backgrounding a couple of tail -f processes.

% xtail /opt/local/apache2/logs/*log

*** /opt/local/apache2/logs/access_log ***
10.10.10.10 - - [17/Feb/2005:23:41:46 -0800] "GET /foobarbazasdfasdf HTTP/1.1" 403 315

*** /opt/local/apache2/logs/error_log ***
[Thu Feb 17 23:41:46 2005] [error] [client 10.10.10.10] client denied by server 
   configuration: /opt/local/apache2/htdocs/foobarbazasdfasdf

*** /opt/local/apache2/logs/access_log ***
10.10.10.10 - bbum [17/Feb/2005:23:41:52 -0800] "GET /svn/ HTTP/1.1" 200 271

This entry was posted on Friday, February 18th, 2005 at 2:33 am and is filed under Mac OS X. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.