I'm pretty new to perl. I'm trying to tail a log file (in any way) and match the output with a string to determine the next course of action. I've tried tailing a few ways, but I can't seem to get the tail to match the string that I'm searching for.

Here are the last few lines of the log that I'm tailing (/var/log/ping_10.10.0.100):

02-23-2010   11:20:01   10.10.0.100 is alive!
02-23-2010   11:30:01   10.10.0.100 is alive!
02-23-2010   11:40:01   10.10.0.100 is alive!
02-23-2010   11:50:01   10.10.0.100 is alive!

[download]

Here's my closest script:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $tail = system("tail -1 /var/log/ping_10.10.0.100.sj");
#print "$tail\n";

if ($tail =~ m/alive/) {
  print "match\n";
} else {
  print "no match\n";
}

[download]

Sadly, it only returns a match if I try to match "0". Of course, I'm trying to match the word "alive". What am I doing wrong?

In reply to Tail a log, then match its string by perl_zen_noob

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