Im trying to find the right command to tail a bunch of log files whilst excluding the zipped files in a set directory. The log files are being zipped as they become oversized.
At the moment Im using:
tail -f /var/logs/myLog*
Which works fine, but it will also tail the .gz files which are a garbled mess. I need to tail only files without this extension.
Usually tail -f /var/logs/myLog*log will work. However, if the end of the filenames is unpredictable, and really the only way is to exclude files ending in .gz, it becomes more complicated. One possibility is this:
ls /var/logs/myLog* | grep -v .gz$ | xargs tail -f
If the filenames have anything else in common - e.g. length of name, number of periods in name, name ending... you can simply adjust your glob.
If not, there are some other ways:
tail -f `ls -l /var/logs/myLog* |grep -v .gz$`
or, using xargs:
ls /var/logs/myLog* | grep -v .gz$ | xargs tail -f
In bash, if the extendedglob option is set (it is by default), you can negate a glob pattern by wrapping it in parentheses and prepending a bang (!). For example, !(*.gz) matches all items whose names don't end with .gz. See the Pathname Expansion subsection in the EXPANSION section in the bash manual page for more information.
In zsh, if the extglob option is set (it is not, by default), you can negate a glob pattern by prepending a caret (^). For example, ^*.gz matches all items whose names don't end with .gz. See the FILENAME GENERATION section in the zshexpn manual page for more information.
Note that in general, if you want to use ls with a glob pattern, you should specify -d. This is because the shell expands the glob pattern into a list of matching names, passing each one to ls as a separate argument. If you don't use -d, ls will list the contents of any directories whose names it's given.
You can use the following line:
file /var/log/* | grep "ASCII text" | cut -d ":" -f 1 | xargs tail -f
