Tony Nelson wrote:
B.
I thought about tail -f, but that only lists the entries being added.
Doing diff would require copying the file and running diff against it
every second or so, and then again it wouldn't necessarily list all the
changes, just the one between the last changed file and the current one.
Copy the file, compare the copy against the previous copy. Note that the
file may have changed during the copy, so the copy may contain partial
changes.
I hope I'm explaining this clearly, but basically the question is, is
there a utility in Linux/Unix world which can track any changes being made
to a file in real-time and list/track/put-in-a-file those changes being
made?
Many thanks for any help you can provide.
Perhaps inotify can resolve the OP's objection to "running diff against it
every second or so", but it is an optimization to apply after the problem
is solved.
Stat()'s are pretty cheap, so checking if the modification time has
changed every second might be reasonable and only doing the
Probably diff'ing is not the correct approach at all, and it would be
helpful to know what is writing that file, and whether it can be persuaded
to write a log file.
As a fairly horrible hack you could strace the process and track the
lseeks and writes, or use the -e write= to get a copy of the writes to
the specified file descriptor.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
