Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

This is half a bleg and half an idea.

Trying to get useful information of log files that are being continually written is kind of frustrating. The usual Linux method is to tail -f the file and then apply a bunch of grep, cut, sed or awk filters to the pipeline. This is clumsy if you don't know what you're dealing with or looking for yet, and there are a bunch of other limitations with this approach. So my idea is to create an application with these features:

• Reads multiple files simultaneously
• Can display lines in multiple 'windows' on screen
• Keeps statistics on each window - e.g. number of lines per second
• Dynamically apply regular expressions to each input or window
• These regexps can be used to:
  • Move text from an input into a window
  • Select lines for display or exclude them from display
  • Reformat the lines to remove unneeded info or make sections homgeneous
  • Keep statistics on lines matching
• Starts right from the end of the file, no need to seek the last N lines
• Can also work in 'static' mode where the file is read from the start
  • An option might be to start in 'pipe' mode and then start reading (backward or forward) through the file as time permits.
• Can write the output of a window to a file as well as display it
• Save and load configurations in a simple text file format so you can easily reload an entire session

I'm thinking it should be named 'wag', because it's the wag tailing the dog and because of a similarity to watch.

If such a thing even vaguely exists, please email me. Otherwise I'll have to think about learning how to write inotify-based ncurses-driven applications in my copious free time.