#22 Problems with tail

[april levin]

Problems with tail

Issue #1:

On a Solaris 7 system, regular tail does not work (may
have been able to get it to work with a re-compile, but
it doesn't work out of the box). CPAN tail works fine.
My path's tail = /usr/bin/tail

Issue #2:

Sometimes swatch (using CPAN tail) will re-read the
entire log it is watching as if it were using --examine.

The startup string I am using in my rc script is:

/usr/local/bin/swatch -c /local/swatch/swatchrc
--use-cpan-file-tail --tail-file=/my/path/to/kadmin.log
--pid-file=/local/swatch/swatchkrbadmin.pid &

(I am trying to watch a kerberos kadmind log)

Recently this sent out over 1900 emails because the log
was very long and had a lot of matching entries. I
fully expected that --tail-file would not reread the
entire file, but it has done it several times. It does
not do this when started manually, but when it has been
running and watching the log.

Swatch is not being stopped/restarted, the logs are not
being rotated or anything, and the process creating the
logfiles is not restarting.

Info about my setup:

Solaris 7

# swatch --version
This is swatch version 3.1.1
Built on 19 Jul 2004
Built by E. Todd Atkins <Todd.Atkins@StanfordAlumni.ORG>

# which tail
/usr/bin/tail

Without using --use-cpan-tail I get the error:

# /usr/local/bin/swatch --tail-file=/var/log/kadmin.log

*** swatch version 3.1.1 (pid:1566) started at Tue Feb
1 13:17:01 EST 2005

usage: tail [+/-[n][lbc][f]] [file]
tail [+/-[n][l][r|f]] [file]
#

Thanks!

[deckeypjeep]

Logged In: YES
user_id=1267878

I'm having this same issue on a solaris 8 box. (issue #2)
I'm also using CPAN tail.

I have messed around with it on two different boxes, can
cannot find a setup issue, nor the trigger for the barrage of
emails it sends out.

Could be an issue with CPANs tail, but I can't tell.

thanks