Re: Log file monitoring - retail?

[Rick Murphy <rmurphy () mitretek org>]

At 03:08 PM 3/16/99 -0500, carson () tla org wrote:
> Once upon a time, I heard of a utility called retail. It was basically
> 'tail -f' that noticed if a new file had replaced the old and
> re-opened it (log file rotation, for example).
This was written by mjr for Gauntlet. What 'retail' does is to cat the
contents of a file to stdout, then remember the eof point and inode number
(in a parallel file). When you next retail the file, the output starts from
the former eof. If the file is deleted and replaced, the inode number
doesn't match and retail starts over.
Sounds like a 10 minute hack to the /bin/cat source to make a replacement.
(Unless you've got Gauntlet source :-)
        -Rick