This project is unfortunately abandoned by the author (gtk) and is therefore unmaintained. Feel free to take over maintainership. After all its released under the GPL. Thank you for your interest in paralogger.
Paralogger is a Bourne shell script to "tail" your system logs
in pseudo transparent borderless Eterm(s).
Paralogger's purpose is to make setting up a "root tail" an easy
set and forget.
Paralogger is not for any specific window manager. It works with
both Enlightenment and
Window Maker as well as
all others that plays nicely with Eterm.
Why it might be useful
Because it is nice to know what is going on with your box. It
also adds to the eyecandy of your desktop :-)
There used to be some unofficial ones, any takers?
(License is GPL)
What makes it different from similar scripts?
Well, you could off course just tail -f /var/log/*
in any terminal. If you are happy with this, then paralogger is not
for you.
Paralogger tries to make the placement of the terminals
(geometry) a little more friendly for the user. Normally you would
be playing with Eterm options and the --geometry switch only to
find out that if you switch your screen resolution later you would
have had to readjust the geometry of the terminal.
What happens when you start paralogger, is that it detects your
screen resolution. It then uses this information to calculate the
base placement of the terminal based on where you want it to be on
the screen. Like the illustration shows here, there are 6
predefined base placement modes.
These 6 predefined placement modes can now be specified from the
command line like:
Let's say I configure paralogger to open the base window at
mc (short for middle center). And my current screen resolution is
800x600. When I start paralogger the base window is in the center
of the screen. I then quit X, restart X in 1600x1200 and start
paralogger. The base window is still in the center.
It doesn't matter what screen resolution you are running because
paralogger will calculate the placement of the terminal for
you.
Modes of operation
You may have been wondering what I mean when I am talking about
the base window. This has to do with the different modes
paralogger can operate in. In single mode, only one window
(the base window) get's opened and is tailing all the logs you have
specified. In vertical cascade mode or horizontal cascade
mode, one window is opened for each log relative to the base
window, either below or to the left of this window.
Note the -save option, this means you can get away with
running only: "paralogger -load" the next time because paralogger
will load the options you specified from the configuration
file.
With wildcards:
paralogger -vv /var/log/*
Note that some files are still empty when tailing them here.
The files are not colored either, because the default is to use
regular tail. There are a lot more files in /var/log/*, but those
that are known to be binary or not written to any longer are
excluded from the list automatically based on certain criterias.
This default behavior can be turned off with -nostop.
Here we specify to use horizontal cascade mode -hcas with a
smaller font and width of the terminal than default. Observe that
you will need a high monitor resolution if you intend to use -hcas
with many files.
Similar programs
Here are some other programs with similar functionality:
Well, you could off course just tail -f /var/log/*
in any terminal. If you are happy with this, then paralogger is not
for you.
