[TriLUG] Re: tail across logrotate

[James Manning]

[M. Mueller at Signalnetware.com]
> I want to "tail -f /var/log/myfile &" for weeks at a time.  I also logrotate 
> /var/log/myfile on a daily basis.  When I logrotate, the file handle changes 
> and the tail no longer works.  I am manually killing/restarting the tail 
> process on a daily basis which is tedious since I do this to 5+ systems per 
> day.
> 
> Any hints on how to automate or otherwise improve this process would be most 
> appreciated.
> 
> PS: Note my new identity on this list.  Yahoo is shutting down POP3 access to 
> email accounts so it's bye-bye to bhu5nji.

AFAICT:

while true; do
   tail -f --pid=$(cat /var/run/the_daemon.pid) the_daemon.log
done

there's prob. better approaches, but I hate ones that end up increasing
the open/close count on the file more than necessary

James