ccze is a wonderful tool that brings real joy to the arduous task of reading or searching thru log files. #nerdalert
We’ve been using ccze for many years but recently stumbled (um, actually, rtfm’d) upon the “missing” feature, namely the ability to output the colorized results in a format that can be piped to other commands such as grep. Introducing the -A flag!
For example:
tail -f /var/log/syslog | ccze -A | grep login
will result in grep results made pretty and readable by ccze – not revolutionary, but very handy. And pretty.
ccze also colorizes ruby, apache, dhcp and most other types of log files and data files, try it out, you’ll be happy you did!
Notes:
- Get ccze on OS X with homebrew: brew install ccze
- Install ccze on Ubuntu / Debian with: apt-get install ccze
- ccze -h will give you HTML output
Below is a quick video showing tail -f on an active DHCP server log with and without ccze and finally using ccze with -A and grep.
