NAME¶
logtool - parse and filter syslog files
SYNOPSIS¶
(stdout) | logtool -[args]
Logtool is a command line program that will parse logfiles into a more palatable
format. It will take anything resembling a syslog or multilog file, as well as
unformatted ASCII, and crunch it into one of the following formats for your
viewing pleasure:
- ANSI (colorized for easy "at a glance" viewing)
- ASCII (e-mail reports/term's w/o color)
- CSV (spreadsheet/database imports)
- HTML (for generating web pages)
- RAW (for no good reason)
OPTIONS¶
- -o [ ANSI | ASCII | CSV | HTML | RAW ]
- Allows you to specify the output format to be one of the following: ANSI
(default), ASCII, CSV, HTML, RAW. Options are not case sensitive (ie: -o
CSV and -o csv should yield the same results)
- -t [ long | short ]
- Allows you to specify the time display format to be one of the following:
(Long [default]) Mon Dy HH:MM:SS or (Short) HH:MM
- -b
- Causes logtool to beep on RED events (ANSI output only). This is usefull
when you want to monitor a logfile on an ongoing basis, and wish to have
your terminal beep whenever something out of the ordinary happens.
- -s
- Causes logtool to not display the syslog "source" field
- -p
- Causes logtool to not display the "program" field
- -c [/path/config.file]
- Allows you to specify a config file other than the default
/etc/logtool/logtool.conf
- -i [/path/includefile]
- Allows you to specify an alterate file containing regex's for inclusion
[default=/etc/logtool/include]
- -e [/path/excludefile]
- Allows you to specify an alternate file containing regex's for exclusion
[default=/etc/logtool/exclude]
- -n
- Causes logtool to skip any attempts to resolve IP->Hostname by the
various modules (handy when your DNS is down temporairly).
- -v
- Set logtool to operate in verbose mode (does nothing currently)
- -V
- Causes logtool to print it's version information and exit
- -h
- Display the help message
SUGGESTED USAGE(S)¶
- As a 'live' logfile monitoring tool:
- tail -f /var/log/messages | logtool -o ANSI -b
- To generate colorized webpages of logfiles:
- cat /var/log/messages | logtool -o HTML >
/home/httpd/html/logs/messages.html
- To generate reports via a cronjob:
- retail /var/log/messages | logtool -o ASCII | mail -s "Daily
report" someuser@somedomain.ext
CONFIG FILE¶
/etc/logtool/logtool.conf
The config file should be commented to the point of being self-documenting, so
we will not comment very extensively on it here. Suffice to say, this is the
place where you should configure 99% of your runtime options for logtool. You
may also have a collection of different default configurations, and select
amongst them by the '-c' option of logtool.
AVAILABILITY¶
Logtool is known to compile/run on all UNIX flavors using a 2.95.x GNU C
Compiler, the GNU Make utility, and a proper ANSI C library (glibc is
recommended, but not required). Specific reports of success include FreeBSD,
OpenBSD, Solaris, SunOS, AIX, SCO, and of course, any known flavor of Linux
(including at least 2 embedded system variants).
SEE ALSO¶
regex(7) for help with constructing regular expressions for the
include/exclude/colors files. If you find no regex manual on your system, try
'apropos regex' and see what you get, or as a last ditch, 'man grep' should at
least point you in the right direction.
You can also find a somewhat better bit of documentation in the textfile
'logtool.txt' (usually in the /usr/doc/, /usr/share/doc/ or similar tree on
most Linux distributions). If you don't know where to look, you can probably
find it by typing 'locate logtool.txt' at the command line.
AUTHOR¶
A.L.Lambert <al@xjack.org>