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An application I am developing locally logs it's output to files formatted with the current timestamp such as app-%Y%m%d.log.

To make it simple to be able to tail the current's day log in a terminal window, I have a symlink named current.log which points to today's log.

At the start of work each day, I need to kill the tail process, point the symlink at today's file, and then re-run the command to tail -f current.log.

Is it possible to change the target of the symlink without having to restart tail - by changing the target of the file handle without tail being any wiser?

To automate this "start of new work day" task it would be easy to setup a cron'ed script to point the symlink at today's file, but it seems that the existing tail process would have no idea that the target has changed.

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  • The operating system abstraction you refer to as "handles" are better referred to as "file descriptors". It's hard to tell, given the state of Microsoft's documentation, but "descriptors" and "handles" are probably different at some level. Commented Apr 1, 2011 at 15:35
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    One way to work around this is to additionally log to a fifo and then xconsole from the fifo. Commented Mar 24, 2012 at 3:31

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I don't think that is possible, unless you can get tail to close and reopen the file periodically. One tail (or any other program) opens a file, it gets a handle to the inode of that file. At that point, filenames and links are no longer consulted. That is why you can delete a file from the filesystem, and any program that has that file open will continue to work. Its is only when the ;ast program closes the file that it actually gets removed from disk.

Update: At least the version tail on OS X has a -F option, which will reopen the file if it has moved.

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    Ubuntu has -F (or --follow=current.log --retry) as well Commented Apr 1, 2011 at 18:39
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    tail -F also works fine in Fedora; the hint about OS X gave me enough of a hint to check it out on my system. This is the best answer at achieving what I want to do (keep tailing a file even if it changes names); seems pretty clear the answer to my root question about symlinks is "no". Thanks! Commented Apr 1, 2011 at 20:19
  • tail -F works for me in ubuntu. Commented Jan 15, 2013 at 20:31
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If you're on a modern linux, you could use inotifywait, one of the command line programs from the inotify-tools package. I haven't done this, but it looks like inotifywait could be used in a shell script to reset the symlink and stop and restart tail -f on the symlink. You might even be able to dispose of the symlink, and just tail the current log file.

Without using inotify, it is possible to write your own tail-like program that checks to see if the inode number of the filename it reads from has changed. At that point, the tail-like program can close it's old file descriptor, and get a new file descriptor for the now-different filename. This is a tricky program to write, and it's prone to race conditions.

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From your description it sounds like your specific circumstance could be solved by making a cron job which also killed/restarted the tail process. But in general, (Mac OS being the exception) tail will remember where you are in the file (that is, the byte offset). Also, the open file handle points to the target file, not the symlink. The symlink becomes irrelevant to the reading process once the file has been opened. Although it's possible to have features which reopen the file based on the original path when something changes, most implementations don't do this.

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Why not log to a file, current.log which you can tail -f to your hearts content, and then use something like /usr/sbin/logrotate to rotate that file. You can specify in the config that you'd like to do some postrotate commands to rename the old file with the date appended, etc. It removes the need for symlinks completely and may also simplify your logging code.

Of course, logrotate may not be installed on the system you are developing for.

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Once a program has open the file, it keeps accessing that same file, even if the file is moved or even deleted. (Removing an open file only removes its name; the file — the inode — is actually deleted once no process has it open.)

Some programs watch if something happens to the file they have open. For example, the classic program tail -f keeps printing lines appended to the same file; some modern implementations (GNU, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OSX) have tail -F, which detects if a new file with the same name is moved into place and starts reading from the new file. Multitail can do that as well (run it as multitail --retry).

You can use the Inotify interface on Linux, or its equivalent on other unices, to detect if a file has changed. On Linux, use the inotifywait command.

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I prefer to use a short perl script instead of /usr/bin/tail -f for that purpose.

See http://search.cpan.org/~mgrabnar/File-Tail-0.99.3/Tail.pm for hints.

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