Re: Multitail users, do you see your logs close?

On 24/05/2026 19:49, AC wrote:
> Do any of you use Multitail to monitor your logs? Have you ever seen 
> it randomly close some or all of the files you're monitoring for no 
> apparent reason?
>
> Every one of my Debian installs does this randomly and I can't seem to 
> figure out why. The program itself continues to run but all the 
> windows/files within it close. This isn't happening on one Redhat 
> machine that I use which uses the same Multitail configurations.
>
> I may have to resort to using just screen/tmux and custom scripts. But 
> I like Multitail because I can customize things like highlighting in 
> color or filtering unneeded text so I hope I can actually fix it.
>
I've seen this in the past year or so too, but haven't yet got around to 
investigating. I have a script which runs (among other parameters) 
"multitail ... -f /var/log/syslog -f /var/log/mail.log -I 
/var/log/dovecot.log -f /var/log/nginx/access.log". This runs in tmux, 
so I can keep a tmux tab open and see all the logs streaming past. This 
script used to be quite reliable, but something happened a while ago and 
now, when I connect to tmux I can occasionally find one or more of the 
multitail windows missing. "-f" is _supposed_ to follow the filename, 
not the descriptor so _should_ work fine with logrotate.

It happens only occasionally, though, so it's usually easiest to just 
quit and restart multitail.