Hello Monks,

I seek guidance on what could potentially be a very easy problem to solve. I have a program that writes an output log to a standard text file on a Win32 machine. I'm looking for a way to parse the newest lines added to that log in real-time (new lines added every 100ms - 20s depending). Each log line contains a unique key, so detecting a new and different line should be simple. So I would need some kind of continuous hold/loop waiting for either changes to the log file, or specifically new lines added, etc. My script would then perform an action based on whether or not a couple of pieces of info are found in the new line of the log file.

Simply reading a text file is simple, looking for new lines is simple, parsing the information out is relatively simple, but the log files tend to grow rather large (>1MB) and re-reading the entire log file every X ms interval seems like a huge waste of resources. I don't know why but the brute force read the entire log over and over method comes to mind first and it feels wrong :/

Is there a simpler, more elegant, more perl method to do this? I am relatively new to perl but not new to programming.

Thank you for any advice.

-Alan

In reply to Parse Log File As Written by alanonymous

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