UNIX for Beginners Questions & Answers

Hi Team,

Can anyone help me here:
I have to access server logs via putty and these logs file is a trailing file (continously updating) with ERROR and WARNINGS... I need to know if I can pull this trailing file to a local drive so that I can do some higlighting on some keywords through Notepad ++

But I need to manipulate data in real-time (not on the archived file)... Also, I don't have write access on the server as well, so cannot write logs to new file on the server.

Please help !

I do not know how to automate notepad++ on UNIX remote files.
However, the rest is doable. I'm not giving the best possbile answer because I cannot do that without knowing your system type and your shell.
1. you need to be able to login in to the server
2. you have to be able to write to a file in your home directory or /tmp

Some flavors of Linux example:

Code:

$ sudo apt-get install sshpass   # do this only once
$ sshpass -p your_password ssh user@hostname 'tail -f /path/to/logfile/filename ' > $HOME/somefile  &

The & makes the command run in the background
$HOME/somefile will have the data you want work with
Note that you need to be very specific about what you want to find locally. Please. Give us example input and desired ouput. Also!
Please give us the output of:

uname -a && echo $SHELL

My example DOES NOT work everywhere.

Thanks @Jim for the answer.
I'm a beginner and may not know everything about UNIX commands. My question was just that if there's any way we can download any file to my local system from Putty/WinSCP and that file is in continous update mode (logs are getting written everytime on that file).

I need to highlight ERROR word with red color in that file.
Normally I use tail -f server.log to follow this file, and keep a eye to see for ERROR line. I just want a better UI so that ERROR lines is visible easily.

Do you have access to cron / crontab on the remote system?

You can probably do this in your terminal by printing an escape sequence to change color (and another after, to reset it to normal). 1;31 means bold+red, 0 means reset. See this list for other colors.

Code:

$ tail -f file | awk '/ERROR/ { $0="\x1b[1;31m" $0 "\x1b[0m"; } 1'

text
text
text
something something ERROR something something
text
text
text

You may even be able to make your computer beep from your terminal, as there's a special nonprinting character \a just for that:

Code:

$ tail -f file | awk '/ERROR/ { $0="\a\x1b[1;31m" $0 "\x1b[0m"; } 1'

text
text
text
something something ERROR something something
text
text
text

Yes, I do have the access to crontab command.

------ Post updated at 03:40 AM ------

Thanks for the help @Crona688 It works like a charm.
It fulfills my problem to an extent.

I would me more happy if I can pull the server.log file to my local Windows directory and it should be updating continously as it do on the server. Can you tell if there's any way to sync/download the file to local drive while it is continoulsy updated on the server path.

Thanks for the help always !

Please show us the code you are using now. We especially need to see how you are accessing the remote file.

If you can directly access the file on the remote server, do you actually need a copy of the file on your Windows system, or do you just need to see new entries as they are added to the file on the remote server?

Trying to keep a local copy of a file synchronized with a continuously changing remote file can be tricky if you can't use tail -f /remote/file/pathname. You you can directly access /remote/file/pathname from your Windows server, tail should be all you need to keep with with changes being added to the file on the remote server and should also be able to keep a local copy of the file up-to-date with text appended to that file on the remote system.

If existing text in the remote file is being modified while additional text is being appended to the end of the file, your problem is MUCH more complicated than you have implied so far.