Thursday 27 September 2012

tail -f with highlighting

If you want to highlight something when doing ‘tail -f’ you can use the following command:
tail -f /var/log/logfile | perl -p -e 's/(something)/\033[7;1m$1\033[0m/g;'
or if your terminal supports colours, e.g. linux terminal, you can use this:
tail -f /var/log/logfile | perl -p -e 's/(something)/\033[46;1m$1\033[0m/g;'
If you need to highlight multiple words you can use something like this:
tail -f /var/log/logfile | perl -p -e 's/\b(something|something_else)\b/\033[46;1m$1\033[0m/g;'
and if you want it to beep on a match use this:
tail -f /var/log/logfile | perl -p -e 's/(something)/\033[46;1m$1\033[0m\007/g;'
If you find that perl is too heavy for this you can use sed:
tail -f /var/log/logfile | sed "s/\(something\)/\x1b[46;1m\1\x1b[0m/g"
Note, that in the last example you have to actually type “cntl-v cntl-[” in place of “^[”
\x1b character can also be used as the escape character.

For the full list of control characters on Linux you can look at:
man console_codes

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