On 24/05/2026 19:49, AC wrote:
Do any of you use Multitail to monitor your logs? Have you ever seen
it randomly close some or all of the files you're monitoring for no
apparent reason?
Every one of my Debian installs does this randomly and I can't seem to
figure out why. The program itself continues to run but all the
windows/files within it close. This isn't happening on one Redhat
machine that I use which uses the same Multitail configurations.
I may have to resort to using just screen/tmux and custom scripts. But
I like Multitail because I can customize things like highlighting in
color or filtering unneeded text so I hope I can actually fix it.
I've seen this in the past year or so too, but haven't yet got around to
investigating. I have a script which runs (among other parameters)
"multitail ... -f /var/log/syslog -f /var/log/mail.log -I
/var/log/dovecot.log -f /var/log/nginx/access.log". This runs in tmux,
so I can keep a tmux tab open and see all the logs streaming past. This
script used to be quite reliable, but something happened a while ago and
now, when I connect to tmux I can occasionally find one or more of the
multitail windows missing. "-f" is _supposed_ to follow the filename,
not the descriptor so _should_ work fine with logrotate.
It happens only occasionally, though, so it's usually easiest to just
quit and restart multitail.
