Logfile viewers for the desktop and shell
Log Tools
While users are surfing the web, listening to music, and writing documents, the kernel and various background daemons write information to logfiles. KSystemLog, Gnome System Log Viewer, and MultiTail will help you read and process logfile data.
If some piece of hardware or software refuses to work, you can’t log in, or a file, print or web server isn’t responding, the logfiles on a Linux system very often give you the hints you need to solve the problem. Logs such as /var/log/messages or /var/log/auth.log keep a watchful eye, but they do so slowly enough for users to be able to investigate their content using standard tools (e.g., tail, less, cut, grep, etc.).
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