61

On windows how can I easily monitor a log file and see updates to the file in real time?

Basically, same functionality like tail -f log_file on Unix systems

Platform: Windows XP/2003/2008 server

[Update] this is quite handy for a quick monitoring(thanks to Ckarras's answer)
Quick screen shot of PowerShell type -wait (type is an alias for get-content) alt text

Rory
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dance2die
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13 Answers13

42

There's also an equivalent to "tail -f" under Windows, if you have PowerShell installed:

type -wait
ckarras
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27

I use Notepad++ as my default text editor on all my systems, and it has the nice bonus of having this built-in - just go Plugins -> Document Monitor -> Start to monitor. You can also use File -> Reload from disk to manually reload it.

Zack Elan
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23

You don't mention which platform you're using, but on Unix-like systems the tail command does this:

tail -f /var/log/messages

In fact there are implementations of tail for Windows also (eg. unxutils).

Greg Hewgill
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22

Actually, Log-Expert does what you want, plus a lot of nice feature

Features for Log-Exprt

montonero
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VonC
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21

If windows is your thing you could try Tail for Win32.

edit: Another alternative I just found is TailXP. It's free, but not opensource. Looks ok from the description but I haven't tried it.

Jorge Alves
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12

I've been using BareTailPro for awhile, and have been very pleased. It hasn't been updated in awhile, but it still meets my needs. There's also a free version.

Here's some of the features:

  • View files of any size (> 2GB)
  • Configurable highlighting
  • Monitor multiple files simultaneously
  • High-performance search algorithm
  • Regular expression text search
  • Filter tail mode (include or exclude lines)
Rob Thomas
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5

I have had good luck with the windows program mtail. It does a very nice job of monitoring an active log. You can configure quite a few options but in general I have found the defaults work very well.

mtail

John Dyer
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4

Like tail -f file.log?

Sophie Alpert
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3

"tail -f logname"?

Paul Tomblin
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3

I love the Kiwi Log Viewer. They were just bought out by Solarwinds -- I assume the product is still for sale (or maybe they're giving it away for free now? They're giving away a few other Kiwi products).

DougN
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2

If you install Cygwin on your Windows machine, you can run tail

Gary Richardson
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2

I typically do this with TextPad. It has the option to monitor that a file has been modified. It is an option to either automatically update the window or to prompt you whether or not you want to reload the file.

bruceatk
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1

If you're using eclipse there's a fully sick plugin called Log Watcher

http://graysky.sourceforge.net/

It supports multiple files, plus color highlighting.

chickeninabiscuit
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