Dear Joan, by use of the common scripts, the file catalina.out will contain the console output (stdout/tderr) of the *JVM* process and -- if not configured in another way -- of the applications. Therefore, you have to deal with the features of output formatting of current JVMs. Or -- as me -- you might pipe this file descriptors through a tiny script that will prepend a timestamp in a format of your choice. This will have the advantage that it also handle "console" output of Java application; despite of the fact that using stdout/stderr instead of a java logging mechanism is a very bad style.
If you don't need to process thousands of lines per second, a simple shell script may do the job: while read line; do echo "`date -Ins` $line"; done To avoid "double-stamping", you may add an heuristic check of the incoming line; please adjust the RegExpr to your neeeds while read line; do [[ ! "$line" =~ ^\d\d\d\d ]] && echo -n "[`date -Ins`] "; echo $line; done Guido