ctail(1)

📦 version 7.20, in alpine 3.22, alpine 3.23, alpine 3.24, debian bookworm, debian trixie, epel 10, epel 9, fedora 43, fedora 44, nixos 26.05, nixpkgs unstable, opensuse-leap 16.0, ubuntu jammy, ubuntu noble, ubuntu questing, ubuntu resolute, ubuntu stonking

💅 ctail — like, the manual page, bestie

okay so real quick, this is the manual for ctail from the byobu fam, section 1 of the manual. pull up a chair, it's a short one and it's lowkey iconic.

✨ NAME ✨

ctail — watch and colorize a logfile 🎀

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

ctail [FILE]

that's it. that's the whole vibe. one optional file argument, no drama, no extra flags, periodt.

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

so ctail is, like, a very simple alias — and I mean genuinely simple, bestie, it is not doing the most — that watches a file and colorizes it. 🌈

and honestly? it's super useful for monitoring logfiles. like, watching a log scroll by in flat grey text is giving ✨nothing✨, but with color? main character energy fr fr. you get to actually see stuff instead of squinting at a wall of monochrome.

ngl the description is only that sentence long in the original too. short queen. 💅

🌸 EXAMPLE 🌸

here's how you'd actually use it, copy-paste ready:

ctail /var/log/syslog

boom. watching /var/log/syslog, but make it pretty. 🫶

💜 SEE ALSO 💜

  • ccze(1) — another colorizer, go say hi
  • tail(1) — the classic, the blueprint, the OG

👑 AUTHOR 👑

this manpage and the utility were written by Dustin Kirkland <kirkland@ubuntu.com> for Ubuntu systems — but like, it may be used by others too, it's not gatekept. 💖

permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU General Public License, Version 3 published by the Free Software Foundation. slay.

on Debian systems, the complete text of the GNU General Public License can be found in /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL, or on the web at:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt

and that's the whole page, bestie!! this one came from byobu, dated 23 Oct 2012, and it lives in section 1 of the manual — ctail(1), no cap. go colorize something. 💅✨🦋

📦 where this page comes from