On: Stop using tail -f (mostly)

[drzaiusapelord]

multitail is great. I really cannot use command line utils that don't support colors/highlighting anymore. htop instead of top, etc. It just gives me much better visibility and readability. I'm surprised that so many non-color utils are still being used. It just feels so 1994 to me to stare at a white on black display. I guess there's nothing more slow moving and conservative than shell interfaces, thus articles like these that shame us into using different tools.

Personally, I'd love to see some hot young talent just do a 100% redo of the standard gnu utils from an interface perspective. Just go crazy with new interface and display ideas, novel presentation modes, novel navigation, etc while still maintaining backwards compatibility. I could see a big disruption here.

[0x0 → drzaiusapelord]

Also take a look at ccze which is great for syntax-coloring all kinds of log files heuristically.

For example: tail -F somefile.log|ccze -A

For your shell, there's a lot of funky colorful interactive customizations you can get on zsh and fishfish.

[acdha → 0x0]

That's really nice – thanks for the pointer. "ssh … varnishncsa | ccze" worked first time without any config, exactly as you'd want.

[cromo → drzaiusapelord]

I wrote a Python script (called synesthesia)[1] that'll colorize input based on regex matches, and any matched text will be the same color for the same content.

The use case that drove its development was needing to keep track of UUIDs across multiple logs - and grep --color will colorize its matches, but not differentiate between ones that have different content. With this, I could watch both logs as data was passed from one to the other and keep track of e.g. the orange one.

I also thought it would be nice to be able to use patterns from logstash's grok, so I wrote grokpat[2] to find patterns for me. A lot of grok's patterns use atomic groups, which aren't available in Python 2, so I wrote redi[3] to convert them from grok's syntax to Python compatible syntax.

So I can now colorize logs easily as follows:

  tail -F program.log | synesthesia "$(redi "$(grokpat uuid)")"

[1] https://github.com/cromo/synesthesia [2] https://github.com/cromo/grokpat [3] https://github.com/cromo/redi

[philsnow → cromo]

that's way better than my alternative which was a bash function:

    function hl() {
      local R=''
      while [ $# -gt 0 ]; do
        R="$R|$1"
        shift
      done
      env GREP_COLORS="mt=38;5;$((RANDOM%256))" egrep --color=always $R
    }

thanks

[smorrow → drzaiusapelord]

I use htop and turn the colours off... thing I like about htop is I can use the mouse. It's so F-key-based, which, especially on a laptop, means you have to take your eyes off the screen to find the keys.

Of course, I'm not opposed to colours, I'm opposed to colours that look tacky / l33t hax0r, which would be most terminal stuff. I like 𝐛𝐨𝐥𝐝 better than trying to find colours I won't hate.

[freehunter → drzaiusapelord]

Switching between many programs and systems, I have a hard time keeping track of what colors mean what. Especially when people start customizing their colors. There are enough tools to show you what a file is, I don't need directories printed in red and files in blue and symlinks in green. ls -l is good enough and works everywhere.