G'day folks,
I mail myself the log files from several services (home made) running on several computers. I'd like to be able to parse them and return results like

	"Everything looks normal"
	"1 error found"
	"Found something strange"

I do not really need to count anything in the logs, all I need to know is whether there's something I have to look at in the logs.

The logs look something like this:

Started some action at ...
	A subtask with some options
	Some more options
		whatever
			job id x
			job id y
		something silly
		done
	Another subtask
	with some options
		some nonsense
			job id x
			...
		done
Action succeeded plus some more info at ....

If the services encounters an error and handles it properly it prints something like

	ERROR: ....
	The action failed at ...
and goes on to next task, but I do not want to just search for "ERROR:". I'd like to catch all "unexpected" texts.

Does anyone have any neat idea how to implement this (taking into account that the expected messages change as we implement additional features!)? Any pointers, suggested modules or articles? Any examples?

I don't need you to write this for me, I'm just interested in ideas.

Thanks, Jenda

== Jenda@Krynicky.cz == http://Jenda.Krynicky.cz ==
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code
will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.
      -- Rick Osborne, osborne@gateway.grumman.com


In reply to Multiline log parsing by Jenda

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