Matt Brown content for you

How to setup GNU screen to tail a log file at startup

Thu, Apr 14, 2011

At work I used byobu on my Fedora machine as a wrapper around screen, and I’ve setup my .byobu/windows file (which is a bit of a replacement for .screenrc in a normal screen session) to open up all of the screen windows I like to have at startup.

I like to start a new session with a few dedicated windows setup:

  1. A window titled “logs” which tails the log file of the main application I’m working on

  2. A window titled “errors” which tails the same log file as #1, but piping the output to grep to watch for ERRORs

  3. A window titled “project” which starts in my project’s main directory

  4. A window titled “bash” which starts in my home directory.

My .screenrc (actually, .byobu/windows) looked like this:

# window 1
chdir /home/matt/code/project/logs
screen -t 'logs'

# window 2
chdir /home/matt/code/project/logs
screen -t 'errors'

# window 3
chdir /home/matt/code/project
screen -t 'project'

# window 4
chdir
screen -t 'bash'

To actually start the tail process, I used to always search through my command history to find the correct tail command I wanted to use in the window (either tail -F current.log or tail -F current.log | grep -A 3 ERROR to watch for the ERRORS only).

Until today, that is, when I figured out how to setup screen to run these commands for me automatically when the screen session starts.

There seems to be two ways to go about this:

  1. You can simply include the command you want to run in this window in the line containing screen -t, such as

    screen -t 'logs' tail -F current.log

    however, this breaks if you want the command to include a pipe, such as

    screen -t 'errors' tail -F current.log | grep -A 3 "ERROR"

    and I couldn’t figure out the correct way to escape this.

    Setting up the screen window this way will also cause screen to exit the window entirely if you enter Ctrl+C, rather than just exiting the command and returning you to the shell (which makes sense if you think about it).

  2. Another way to execute a command in the window at startup is to use the stuff command, which will paste whatever string you want into the input buffer of the current window. The trick here is to also include the escape sequence for the Enter key, to simulate someone actually entering the command and then pressing enter at the keyboard:

    screen -t 'errors'
stuff 'tail -F /var/ec/current.log | grep -A 3 "ERROR"^M'

    (the ^M is entered by pressing Ctrl+V, Enter with your keyboard, not by actually typing caret and uppercase M)

This works like a charm - when I start a new screen/byobu session, I have windows named “logs” and “errors” setup which are already tailing the log files I would like them to.

Sources that were helpful in figuring out how to set this up: