Chasing Your Tail
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I've just discovered the *nix command, tail - and what a useful command it is.
In its simplest form, tail displays the last 10 lines of a file. Now I appreciate that this doesn't sound very exciting, but tail has a particularly useful trick up its sleeve... the -F option.
When used with the -F option, tail will automatically follow a file, continually sending appended data to standard output.
If you're still not excited, connect to your web-server, with telnet or an SSH client, and enter the following command:
tail -F /usr/local/apache/logs/access_log
(Substitute /usr/local/apache/logs/access_log for the path to your web-server's "access_log" file.)
You should see a log of access requests for your website that is updated in real-time!tail is great for watching any log: accesses, errors, firewall, IDS, proxy, etc.
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