BareTail Is A Windows Equivalent Linux Tail App Monitors Log File

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If you ever worked with Linux or Unix from a shell, chances are you might encounter some useful command line tools that are not existing in Windows. For example, tail or less are two of the popular Linux/Unix commands that split partial log files or any text files to the terminal. It’s very useful for monitoring server access logs, or any other files that have other processes writing text into it. Windows by default has its own tools like Notepad to open text files, but they don’t usually update themselves if the original files have changed.

BareTail is a freeware, which also comes with a commercial version, that allows you to essentially tail a text file and display the updates as soon as the process writes into the file.

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One top of the basic features is to split the log. It also allows users to highlight lines based on keywords from the log file. Here for instance, I’m only interested in all the POST request sent to the server. You can go to “highlighting”, add the POST under string, and select a background color that stands out. By default it’s case sensitive.

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Apart from the highlighting, you can also customize how the font looks. There are also options to set how often to update the log, or in this case the delay. By default, BareTail will always display the latest (the very bottom) of the log, when you scroll the log up, it will deactivate so it doesn’t jump to the bottom of the log automatically.

Give it a try, if you ever looking for an equivalent tool to tail or less the log on Windows in real time, BareTail is the tool to go.

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