retail

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

retail tries to be an intelligent incremental logfile reader. It will read a file or list of files given as arguments, and output any new contents thereof to stdout. If the file has changed, it will attempt to handle the situation intelligently.

It keeps track of what parts of a file it has read in the past, and only reads lines which have been appended since the last time it was asked to read the file(s) in question. It does this via several methods. First, it tracks the position in the file in bytes, and tries to return there on subsequent calls. If it is unable to return to the previous position, or if the data found at the previous position has changed since last time, it will rewind to the beginning of the file, and search for the data which was at the last known position. Failing any of those methods to find it's last known position, it will rewind to the very beginning of the file, and read and output to stdout from there. Oh yeah, it tracks it's state info in offset files named (by default) /path/file.aoffset, in the format of "position:last_known_data".

OPTIONS

-d

Output debug info on stderr (probably only of use for developers like me).

-h

Show summary of options.

-V

Show version of program.

-s suffix

Change the default suffix to something other than .aoffset.

-p prefix

Specify an alternative directory to place the offset files into.

SEE ALSO

AUTHOR