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Man Pages
logtool(1) FreeBSD General Commands Manual logtool(1)

logtool - parse and filter syslog files

(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)

-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 /usr/local/etc/logtool/logtool.conf
-i [/path/includefile]
Allows you to specify an alterate file containing regex's for inclusion [default=/usr/local/etc/logtool/include]
-e [/path/excludefile]
Allows you to specify an alternate file containing regex's for exclusion [default=/usr/local/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

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

/usr/local/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.

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).

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.

A.L.Lambert <al@xjack.org>
LOCAL

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