


The era of very affordable clouds is here, and even small companies run distributed systems that consist of many components-the emphasis here is on many. However, in this day and age tail has lost a lot of its appeal. There are variations out there that can monitor multiple files at once, provide filtering and color highlighting of text patterns, or display the text output on the desktop background.Īnd of course you could always pipe the output from tail into other commands to process it further. Because tail is such a handy tool many enhanced versions were developed over time in order to overcome some of the original’s limitations.
Powershell read log file in real time windows#
It was a very common thing to see a small (or large) collection of terminal windows lined up on the screens of IT pros, each running a single tail-f session monitoring different files, often remotely via a ssh connection. (On Windows, the PowerShell command Get-Content provides similar functionality when invoked with the parameters -Tail and -Wait.)īack in the good old days when most things a developer or sysadmin had to worry about happened locally on one or a few remote machines, good old tail was simple and efficient. It is a perfect tool to get a real-time view into what is written to a log file, making it one of the greatest little utilities for debugging and troubleshooting a program or system. You can watch live as lines are being added. When invoked with the command line option -f (follow), it allows you to monitor a file. One of those classics is the Unix command tail, which many developers and IT professionals use on a daily basis. Let’s be frank: Sometimes (read: very often) nothing beats the command line with its set of classic utilities.
