Here are are some small things you might find useful when you need to deal with text files. In the Linux/Unix world, a lot of things are text files, so you need to know how to efficiently handle them. If you are a sysadmin, you need to look at log files for most of your work time and the following might come in handy.
Following a log file
Take your $GENERIC_SERVICE on your server that generates a lot of logs. You could open a text editor like vi or emacs to view the logs or use tail to see the latest lines (or a combination of tail and head). But you sometimes you need to view contents of the log in real time (while the service writes the lines, you read them). This is where the best use for the tail command comes in: the --follow flag.
tail -f /var/log/mylogTail usually creates a process that prints a few lines (the lines that exist when you run it), but with the -f flag, the tail process keeps running and prints new lines as the file is being appended. The process will close when the uses issues the Cltr-D (end of file) command.
Truncating a file
Maybe you need to clear the contents of a log file that has gotten too big. You could do a rm on the file and let the service write the new logs in a new file. Some services are picky and need the file to already exist, so you could use the touch command (that “updates” an existing file) which has the interesting side effect when applied on a non existing file: to create an empty file (a new inode with no data blocks).
But you just want to empty a file (same inode, just the contents cleared). You could use the truncate command with the size flag of 0 bytes (-s 0). Or make use of the redirect operator >.
:>fileor just
>fileThese will open the file, and redirect nothing into it. Since it is not appending anything, the contents will be erased. : is the no-op command so nothing will actually be done, but the shell with open and write (well … nothing) into the file because of the redirection operator >.
One input, two outputs
Some programs do not have a logging system programmed into them and just print messages to standard output. Maybe you want to save that output into a file for future use. This is simple to do with a file redirection:
./myprogram > my_log_fileBut if you do this, you will lose the output to the (virtual) terminal. A very interesting command is tee, that takes an input and writes to standard output, but also writes into a specified file. You need to pipe the output of a process into tee like this:
./myprogram | tee my_log_fileNow you have both real time printing of the messages and you have them saved for future use.
Hope this helps!