Alternative to "TAIL for Win32"

[badgerfruit]

Hello Guys and Gals.
I need to be able to read through SMTP logs and apply a filter to make tracing problems easier. At the moment I use Firefox's Find and Highlight features which work but mean scrolling a plenty as these logs can be several MB (doesn't sound a lot but they're plain text so they are HUUUGE!!!).

I'd like to be able to download the log, enter a filter as I can in Tail and it only show matching line. Finding software to do that is proving difficult and we're not willing to spend any money on it (after all, it might take longer to do manually, but no point spending £££ on it).

Tail would be good but the files seem to be too big and it only shows the tail of the file (no good). Sorry for babbling on, I hope that someone can come forward with some recommendations. Thank you.

 

[TimStitt]

Hi BadgerFruit,

Here's what I/the team came up with last time, hope this helps.
http://www.sevenforums.com/software/14955-tail-like-utility.html

Tim

 

[badgerfruit]

Great, thanks!
/slaps one-self for not searching forum first, sorry!

I'll give it a go and see if it matches our needs!
Many thanks again for the link

 

[TimStitt]

Great, thanks!
/slaps one-self for not searching forum first, sorry!

I'll give it a go and see if it matches our needs!
Many thanks again for the link

No prob... I always forget to search too . Let me know how you go.

 

[badgerfruit]

OK, although this seems to fit most of our requirements, there doesn't seem to be any options to view only the highlighted lines.

For example if I tell it to highlight [email protected], sure enough it highlights but the other 10,000 rows are still visible making it just as hard to find as it is using Firefox's find/highlight. Any ideas on products that would do this?

 

[TimStitt]

I see what you mean, highlight works great but there is no filter option for the highlight so that you only see the highlighted entries.

I'm not aware of a windows tail utility that does this, at least not a free one (which is all that I have looked at). But I'm not giving up on you, what is the goal here? Does it need to be a tail utility or is there a specific goal that we can vbscript or batch for?

 

[Hasan Madrid]

Thanks.

 

[badgerfruit]

TimStitt, after consideration, the tool would be more of a "GREP for Windows" then it would be a "tail replacement" ... after all, I don't need to see the log updating in real-time but to simply output to screen and filter the output by my keyword(s).

For example, in linux I can use "more /var/log/email.log | grep [email protected]" and it would parse the file, returning only lines where [email protected] was present.

Now, after performing a goooooogle search for the correct tool, it seems there are quite a number - the lack of admin rights on the PC I am using is now the only remaining obsticle. Mind you, for now, I have worked a way out to get the info I need - stuff the log file onto an FTP site and query via linux shell (where more and grep are already there).

This works and I have managed to filter the terms quite nicely.
I appreciate your time and help with this though and I'm sorry for asking the wrong question to start off with!!

/DOH

 

[TimStitt]

This works and I have managed to filter the terms quite nicely.
I appreciate your time and help with this though and I'm sorry for asking the wrong question to start off with!!

/DOH

Great! no worries, I'm just happy to hear that you have a solution.

.... also another good reminder of why I like those fantastic freebies in Linux distributions and great little commands like Grep.