Tail Multiple Files Simultaneously

In real world projects, we often want to monitor multiple log files Simultaneously. This can be achieved much simpler than opening a handful of windows and tail one file in each of these windows.

• GNU tail

  Now, the GNU tail (tail comes with Linux) supports multiple files as this:

  tail -F file1 file2 ...
  

  This solution is simple and neat. It does not demand extra libraries or tools. However, there is a small downside: outputs from all files interleaved. When the logs scroll really fast, this would make it hard to identify the source (file) of each line.

• multitail

  Besides the "standard" tail, there is also a 3rd-party tool called multitail. It splits a window into several panes and tail one file per pane. This makes its output much neater. The only issue is that you do not always have multitail at hand. "multitail" is not installed by default in most systems and you may have to install it as well as its dependencies from source code.