LatestLog

Latest Changes

2000-05-01 Released 1.2.2 with bugfixes for Solaris 8.
2000-04-29 Released 1.2.1 with better accumulation/displaying of text.
2000-03-13 Released 1.1 with -I option.

Description

The LatestLog package keeps a tiny database of when you last looked at a particular file (usually a logfile) using latestlog. If the file has changed (grown) since that last time, latestlog will only display the new contents. The key issue is to avoid any possibility of not displaying information, so if weird situations arise, latestlog will fall back on starting from scratch and displaying the whole file.

I used the genopt utility when starting this code. It's also hosted by SourceForge.

SourceForge lists this project as Software :: System Software :: System Monitoring :: LatestLog File Monitoring Utilities (if you didn't already know), and that's the link to their project page. You can jump back to here, or download the releases, or do stuff. (I really would appreciate feedback, though.)

Oddities and Interesting Things

If you're curious and desperate, I did a quick nroff -man latestlog.1 | col -b to dump the man page to a text file. The result looks awful and shouldn't be used as real documentation, but if you want to get a feel for what latestlog does, the text file is available here. This is probably not up-to-date.

Download

LatestLog is released under the GNU General Public License version 2. It uses the pseudo-joke utility library Mmap-1.2.tar.gz, which I wrote to demonstrate some configuration issues to others. It does, however, provide a little wrapper class for memory-mapped I/O, and I use it in LatestLog. The source is included, so you don't need to download the library unless you're in need of a good laugh.

The latest release is latestlog-1.2.2.tar.gz.

Nota Bene: The code is embarassing but perfectly functional. I encourge you to compile and use this program, but please don't read the code unless you have made out your will and testament and consulted with family lawyers.


If you have no location bar displayed, or you haven't been paying attention, then you probably aren't aware that this project is currently hosted by the folks at SourceForge.