When comparing MultiTail vs tail -f, the Slant community recommends tail -f for most people. In the question“What are the best tools to monitor log files in a shell?” tail -f is ranked 1st while MultiTail is ranked 2nd. The most important reason people chose tail -f is:
Works in any Unix environment.
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Pros
Pro Colorized output
Logfiles can be displayed colorized. Colorization can be set via regular expressions. There's also a selection of pre-defined color schemes available to choose from.
Pro Can monitor each logfile in a separate window
MultiTail can create a windows for each monitored logfile (via ncurses). Terminal can be split horizontally and vertically as needed.
Pro Includes basic statistics
Pro Can merge inputs
MultiTail allows merging multiple logfiles and commands in a single window. To merge: multitail file1.log -I file2.log
.
Pro Interactive interface
Pro Allows filtering lines
Through regular expressions certain lines can be filtered.
Pro Can monitor wildcards
MultiTail can be set up so that most recently updated file matching a wildcard will be monitored.
Pro Portable
Works in any Unix environment.