Tailing Rolling Files

Question

I have a directory full of rolling log files that I would like to be able to use tail on.

The files are named as such:

name      modified
00A.txt   Dec 2         


        

Answer 1

you may need inotify to detect the creation of the new file, a workaround for that would be to keep polling the filesystem while running tail on the background:

#!/bin/bash

get_latest() {
    local files=(*.log)
    local latest=${files[${#files[@]}-1]}
    echo "$latest"
    [[ $latest == $1 ]]
}
run_tail() {
    tail -c +0 -f "$1"
}

while true; do
    while current=$(get_latest "$current"); do
        sleep 1
    done
    [[ $pid ]] && kill $pid
    run_tail "$current" & pid=$!
done

(untested, unnecesarily hacky and be careful with the limitations of your old system!)