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Pablo Fernandez
Asked: 2010-02-13 16:10:51 +0800 CST

Tail multiple remote files

  • 772

Is there a way to remote tail 2 files?

I have two servers(a and b) behind a load balancer and I would like to do something like this if possible:

tail -f admin@serverA:~/mylogs/log admin@serverB:~/mylogs/log

Thanks!

linux logging console tail

11 Answers

  1. My preferred option is to go with multitail. I'd run something like:

    multitail -l 'ssh user@host1 "tail -f /some/log/file"' -l 'ssh user@host2 "tail -f /some/log/file"'
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  2. Best Answer

    This worked for me:

    ssh -n user@hostname1 'tail -f /mylogs/log' &
ssh -n user@hostname2 'tail -f /mylogs/log' &
    • 32

  3. You can use fabric to tail several hosts (and also grep results, if needed):

    $ fab -P -u 'USER' -p 'PASSWORD' --linewise -H host1,host2,host3 -- tail -f /path/to/my/log.log | grep ERROR
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  4. I was thinking it might also be possible to use:

    ssh -f user@hostname1 "tail -f /var/log/file" > /tmp/somefile &
ssh -f user@hostname2 "tail -f /var/log/file" > /tmp/somefile &

    The -f option after ssh allows you to enter a password before it runs in the background. Then you could have the line-by-line results in a single file and running:

    tail -f /tmp/somefile

    Would give you a little more control over the current "tail" command in case you wanted to use other tail options for displaying output.

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  5. Check out this answer on stackoverflow -- it uses dsh and tail -f.

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  6. Take a look at multitail. Just like the examples above, you can give it as a command to ssh, and then you will end up with one screen displaying (and buffering for easy scrollbacks) multiple logs. It also does coloring, which is very useful for spotting anomalies.

    • 5

  7. Parallel ssh has a nice solution for this:

    pssh -t0 -H 'host-01 host-02 host-03 host-04' -P tail -f /var/log/app.log
    • -t0 disables the connection timeout, otherwise pssh closed the connection
    • -H '<host>...' is the list of hosts to run the command
    • -P is to enable printing the stdout of each host
    • tail -f /var/log/app.log can be any command that your remote shell can run
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  8. What would you say about something like this? http://gist.github.com/303175

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  9. Just a weird solution, but it works!:

    Screen 1

    ssh user@hostname1 "tail -f /var/log/file" > /dev/pts/6

    Screen 2

    ssh user@hostname2 "tail -f /var/log/file" > /dev/pts/6
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  10. You can checkout dbitail.

    A Java tool I created, able to read local and distant log files using SSH. It is fairly simple to use.

    Some more explanations: https://github.com/pschweitz/DBITail/wiki

    Just download version corresponding to your operating system, of native jar release executable within your Java Runtime (requires java 8_40 or higher):

    https://github.com/pschweitz/DBITail/releases

    You can find a complete documentation (embedded with and I Github's page as well)

    Philippe

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