This is an introduction to the Tail command, available on Unix/Linux systems. Tail has many applications, but this video concentrates on its basic usage and useful options, as they pertain to Drupal developers.
You'll learn how to take a quick peek at recent log messages from a single log file, how to do the same thing with multiple logs, as well as watching log files in real time! We'll finish up with a practical application, to see why this is useful.
Commands used in this video:
To view the documentation (or manual) for the tail command:man tail
To show the last 20 lines of the webserver's access log file:tail /var/log/apache2/access.log
To show the last 20 lines of the webserver's error log file:tail /var/log/apache2/error.log
To show the last 20 lines of the webserver's error log file and continue to print new lines added to the file:tail -f /var/log/apache2/access.log