Bash function for easily watching logs and colorizing the output

Another useful bash function I have on my servers. It’s a wrapper around tail -F and ccze . It will look for a log file (prepends /var/log/ to the patch if it can’t find it), and pipes it into ccze for colorizing the output. Handy if you find yourself watching logs. I mostly use it for dhcp/tftp/mail where I don’t have a huge amount of traffic (i.e. can watch it in real time) and am expecting an event/log entry.

logwatch() {
  local logfile=
  for path in '' /var/log/; do
    if [[ -r "${path}${1}" ]]; then
      tail -n50 -F "${path}${1}" | ccze ${2:+--plugin} ${2} --mode ansi --convert-date
      return
    fi
  done
}

logwatch() {

local logfile=

for path in '' /var/log/; do

if [[ -r "${path}${1}" ]]; then

tail -n50 -F "${path}${1}" | ccze ${2:+--plugin} ${2} --mode ansi --convert-date

return

done

}

Usage:

1 2	logwatch kern.log logwatch /var/log/apache2/access.log