danmcb has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I have a log file which contains SOAP messages, and they're long. Very long. Each message ends up as a line of maybe 700 chars or so.

If this was an apache log, I would of course just do tail -f on it and use that to debug. But that won't work, it's too damn unreadable to be useful..

Of course, using perl to decode XML is a cinch. But How can I get perl to be a wrapper on tail -f, so that I can see formatted or filtered messages in real time, without all the crud?

Thank you kindly!

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: using perl to format tail -f
by moritz (Cardinal) on Apr 14, 2008 at 14:46 UTC
    You can just pipe the output from tail -f to perl: tail -f /var/log/apache2/access.log | perl -pe 's/ /\t/g'

    This tail -f's the apache log file, and replaces each space with a tab (useless, but it shows how you can do it).

    And of course there's File::Tail on CPAN:

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      Or to a script: 
      #!/usr/bin/env perl
use warnings;
use strict;

while(<>) {
 #... do something with the latest line, $_
}

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      Usage: 
      tail -f /var/log/apache2/access.log | myscript.pl

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Re: using perl to format tail -f
by apl (Monsignor) on Apr 14, 2008 at 14:39 UTC
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Re: using perl to format tail -f
by oko1 (Deacon) on Apr 14, 2008 at 15:46 UTC

    One way is to open 'tail -f' as a 'read-from' filehandle within your script, as documented in perlopentut. 

    open Tail, '/usr/bin/tail -f /my/log/file |' or die "Pipe failed: $!\n
+";
while (<Tail>){
    # Do stuff
}

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-- 
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe. -- HG Wells
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      IIRC, on some platforms, "tail -f" may buffer the output so that you will get batches of output rather than real-time output.

      This is only on some platforms, and other versions will have a flag to disable buffering.

      Just a tidbit that may effect your results.

      --MidLifeXis

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Re: using perl to format tail -f
by poolpi (Hermit) on Apr 15, 2008 at 08:38 UTC
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