tail f with highlighting

tail f with highlighting

If you want to highlight something when doing �tail -f� you can use the following command:

tail -f /var/log/logfile | perl -p -e s/(something)/33[7;1m$133[0m/g;

or if your terminal supports colours, e.g. linux terminal, you can use this:

tail -f /var/log/logfile | perl -p -e s/(something)/33[46;1m$133[0m/g;

If you need to highlight multiple words you can use something like this:

tail -f /var/log/logfile | perl -p -e s/ (something|something_else) /33[46;1m$133[0m/g;

and if you want it to beep on a match use this:

tail -f /var/log/logfile | perl -p -e s/(something)/33[46;1m$133[0m07/g;

If you find that perl is too heavy for this you can use sed:

tail -f /var/log/logfile | sed "s/(something)/x1b[46;1m1x1b[0m/g"

Note, that in the last example you have to actually type �cntl-v cntl-[� in place of �^[�
x1b character can also be used as the escape character.

For the full list of control characters on Linux you can look at:

man console_codes

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