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My embedded system is connected to a Linux computer via a serial interface and produces multiple text log files with lines, prepended by a timestamp. I'd like to view several such files off-line simultaneously and keep them visually synchronized by time - if a scroll one, the rest are scrolled too, based on the timestamps. Is there an off-the-shelf viewer to do that? If not - what could be the minimum effort way to do that?

Thanks in advance.

tblum
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2 Answers2

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Chainsaw gives you the ability to tail multiple files at the same time.

Chainsaw also supports something like a database 'view', where you can tell Chainsaw to aggregate events from the various sources into a single table, through the 'View, create tab from expression' menu option.

For example, if all of your log files share a common logger hierarchy (com.mycompany.blah.blah), you could define an expression with your root logger as the expression in order to get all events from all files with that logger into a single table:

logger ~= com.mycompany

Or, if you want all of the events from all of the sources, just give it a non-expression (just a text name), although you'll need to pause the chainsaw-log tab or you'll get Chainsaw log messages as well:

ALL

You can also control how events that are received from these files end up in the UI. By default, the events for each file end up in its own tab..however, this is configurable via the 'tab name/event routing expression' in preferences.

And while it probably isn't what you're looking for, you can 'undock' individual tabs and lay them out on-screen to see them all at the same time, but Chainsaw won't 'sync' as you scroll.

If you are interested, try the latest developer snapshot of Chainsaw - it has a lot of additional features and improved usability over what is currently released:

http://people.apache.org/~sdeboy

Scott
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  • Thanks! Does it run on Windows too? – tblum Feb 28 '13 at 10:53
  • Yes, download the 'STANDALONE' zip, which when extracted, has all of the dependencies and a shell script for launching it (in the bin folder). – Scott Feb 28 '13 at 19:51
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If you are viewing logs on Windows, Logparser http://logparserplus.com/Examples, a free command line tool from Microsoft, has some crazy capabilities with standard logs.

I had to develop an in-house tool to deal with multiple log files, and it makes some use of Logparser, to produce a master log file of interesting (or all) events. Handling proprietary time stamps, and logs from multiple time zones!

Kamran Tavakoli
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