On 2026-05-31 11:03, David Wright wrote:
On Sun 31 May 2026 at 10:49:16 (-0700), AC wrote:
On 2026-05-31 05:15, Darac Marjal wrote:
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.
Mine are usually running in xterms and not using screen or tmux. It
seems to happen at the same time every time so I'm thinking it's
related to a log rotate or other timed event but I can't figure out
what exactly kills it or why.
When I use tail, I use -F, not -f, and that works through log
rotations. Do you need --retry or --retry-all in multitail to
achieve the same effect?
Cheers,
David.
I'll give that a shot. It wasn't required before but perhaps something
about log rotations has changed enough that it trips up multitail.
