How to tail all the log files inside a folder and subfolders?

Question

In Linux, using the command tailf, how can I tail several log files that are inside a folder and in the subfolders?

score 97 · Accepted Answer · edited Oct 19 '21 at 15:31

97

To log all the files inside a folder, you can go to the folder and write

tail -f *.log

To add the subfolders to the tailf command, use

tail -f **/*.log

Of course, the regular expression can be improved to match only specific file names.

edited Oct 19 '21 at 15:31

Marc

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answered Aug 19 '13 at 19:13

nakib

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To to tail folder+ sub folders `tail -f ../logs/**/*log* ../logs/*log*` – so_mv Dec 05 '13 at 22:22
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Is there a way to tail all files and all new files (doesn't exist yet)? – Soichi Hayashi Oct 29 '14 at 20:53
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`multitail -Q 5 '/path/to/logs/*'` - where 5 is number of seconds to check for new files. Install it using `apt-get install multitail` or `yum` or whatever. – luchaninov Sep 10 '15 at 10:43
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`tailf **/*.log` Works with only one level of sub-folders – Arun Thundyill Saseendran Nov 22 '17 at 09:36
thank you @luchaninov, `multitail` was exactly what I was looking for. If I had 5 files, for instance, I wanted to see all 5 of them on the terminal at once and only the last few lines of each as the data changed. – haventchecked Sep 22 '19 at 15:45

score 32 · Answer 2 · edited Dec 01 '19 at 15:06

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This will recursively find all *.log files in current directory and its subfolders and tail them.

find . -type f $ -name "*.log" $ -exec tail -f "$file" {} +

Or shortly with xargs:

find . -name "*.log" | xargs tail -f

edited Dec 01 '19 at 15:06

Noam Manos

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answered Dec 11 '13 at 05:35

cevaris

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score 18 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 23 '16 at 10:31

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If all log files doesn't have same extension. You can use following command.

tail -f **/*

answered Jun 23 '16 at 10:31

Farid Movsumov

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@farid-movsumov Could you please explain the meaning of **/*? – Velaro May 16 '19 at 09:53

Asclepius · Answer 4 · 2022-10-11T13:04:17.000

To formalize the comment by luchaninov into an answer, multitail is useful if the set of filenames changes. In contrast, tail doesn't seem to be able to find new files that were created after it was started.

Installation:

sudo apt install multitail

Manual:

man multitail

Usage:

multitail -Q 4 '/path/to/logs/*.log'

The above command should check the quoted pattern every specified number of seconds for new files. The pattern must be quoted.

score 1 · Answer 5 · answered Aug 26 '15 at 17:23

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This way find files recursively, print lines starting on line 5 in the each file and save on concat.txt

find . -type f \( -name "*.dat" \) -exec tail -n+5 -q "$file" {} + |tee concat.txt

answered Aug 26 '15 at 17:23

Ivan Nack

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How to tail all the log files inside a folder and subfolders?

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