It’s a rare occasion that I need to monitor multpile logfiles at once, but on those occasions, it can get messy trying to juggle the tail -f command across multiple console windows (or worse, across multiple virtual terminals!). There’s a tool, however, that will take all of those windows/consoles and condense them into one terminal: LogMon.

I found LogMon in Zonker’s latest Tool of the Month column over at Unix Review. Zonker picked it as a favored FreeBSD tool, but there are Linux sources available as well. Installation is a simple matter of untarring the archive and running make install in the unpacked directory.

After installation, LogMon is invoked simply by executing the logmon command with the desired logfiles as arguments. It then displays the tail of the specified files in a split window, and the contents scroll as new entries are added to the log. For example, I ran logmon /var/log/messages /var/log/userlog and was presented with a split screen displaying the contents of each window.

LogMon thus makes a great tool for troubleshooting software issues and for monitoring system activity. I’ve already installed it on both of my FreeBSD servers and plan to have it on my Linux boxen soon.