BareTail is a real-time log file monitoring tool.
Features
Real-time file viewing
- Optimised real-time viewing engine
- View files of any size (> 2GB)
- Scroll to any point in the whole file instantly
- View files over a network
- Configurable line wrapping
- Configurable TAB expansion
- Configurable font, including spacing and offset to maximise use of screen space
Follow tail mode
- View the end of a growing file in real time, no matter how fast the file grows
- Like "tail -f" on Unix systems, but with many more features
Tail multiple files
- Simultaneously monitor multiple files for changes using tabs
- Visual indication on each tab of file status and changes
- Tabs may be positioned on any side of the window and oriented horizontally or vertically
Configurable highlighting
- Lines containing particular strings can be highlighted to help you notice important text
- Highlight colours are fully customisable
International character sets
Many file formats
- Windows / DOS text files (lines end in CR/LF pairs)
- Unix text files (lines end in LF)
- Microsoft IIS logfiles (and other files terminated with a string of nulls)
Flexible configuration options and storage
- Many configurable user preferences
- Preferences can be saved to a file, the registry or not at all on exit
- Preferences are loaded from a file in the local directory, a file in the application directory or the registry (in that order)
- Preferences can be loaded and saved at any time by the user, and shared with other users
Single small executable, no installer
- No installation needed, start using the tool immediately
- Small executable can be run from the network
- Easy to temporarily install and then completely remove
Comments and Reviews
It's 2017 and I've still not found a more stable alternative than Baretail, which was last updated in 2006. It's spartan on features but it works.
Hi ryansmith1! I wrote an alternative by my self (I missed some features in baretail). So it would be interesting for what you think about it. You wanna have a try?
You can checkout
in'side log .
A Java tool I created, able to read local and distant log files using SSH. It is fairly simple to use.
Some more explanations: https://github.com/pschweitz/insidelog/wiki
Just download the version corresponding to your operating system, or the native jar release executable within your Java Runtime (requires java 8_40 or higher):
https://github.com/pschweitz/insidelog/releases
You can find a complete documentation (embedded with and in Github's page as well)
[Edited by pschweitz, January 22]
This tool is from 2006 and I still haven't found a better one.