Aaron Johnson Now with 50% less caffeine!

Windows Tail

[update 10:08pm] I know that tail exists for Windows by using cgywin or some of the other ports. If you view the article you’ll see that this utility isn’t run from the command line and uses VB.NET code, which I thought was a interesting…]

From the artima newsletter: Windows tail: “The UNIX operating system has long had a set of really good text file processing utilities. On of the utilities is a program named tail. What tail does is it displays the bottom of a file and then waits for any new information to be written to the end of that file then it displays that information, scrolling up as it goes along. This is perfect for monitoring log files to watch them actually grow as information is being written to them.

Enter Windows Tail, or wtail.exe. This is a program written in VB.NET using the Microsoft DOTNET Framework 1.1 which must be installed on your system in order for this program to run.“

Why bother? Just use Win32 port of GNU utilities freely available from http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/.

There are several versions of “tail” available for Windows. We’ve been using one for monitoring some of our CF logs as far back as early 1998.

hello? what about cygwin …

Hmmm? Didn’t you get a copy of the memo? Native users of the Win OS don’t want to run under cygwin. Let’s just remember that, mmmm-kay? Thanks.

I wrote another windows tail in the .net framework not knowing that this existed, althougth the link is dead now. It is at http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/Workspaces/Workspace.aspx?id=92154c86-ef7f-4426-87ed-4397dd00aa89