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

On 2026-05-31 11:03, David Wright wrote:
> On Sun 31 May 2026 at 10:49:16 (-0700), AC wrote:
>> On 2026-05-31 05:15, Darac Marjal wrote:
>>> 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.
>>>
>>
>> Mine are usually running in xterms and not using screen or tmux. It
>> seems to happen at the same time every time so I'm thinking it's
>> related to a log rotate or other timed event but I can't figure out
>> what exactly kills it or why.
> 
> When I use tail, I use -F, not -f, and that works through log
> rotations. Do you need --retry or --retry-all in multitail to
> achieve the same effect?
> 
> Cheers,
> David.
> 
I'll give that a shot. It wasn't required before but perhaps something 
about log rotations has changed enough that it trips up multitail.