LOGTOP(1)

📦 version 0.7, in debian bookworm, debian trixie, ubuntu jammy, ubuntu noble, ubuntu resolute, ubuntu stonking

👑 LOGTOP — the manual, but make it slay

okay bestie, sit down, hydrate, because we're about to talk about logtop from the General Commands Manual and it's genuinely iconic. no cap. 💅

✨ NAME ✨

logtop — Realtime log line rate analyser 🦋

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

logtop [OPTIONS]

that's it. that's the whole vibe. you feed it stuff, it tells you things. periodt. ✨

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

okay so logtop is a System Administrator tool that analyzes the line rate on stdin. the way it works is literally this: it reads on stdin and prints a constantly updated result, and that result shows up in columns, like so:

  • Line number 🔢
  • count 🔢
  • frequency 🔢
  • and the actual line 📝

and bestie, listen, this:

$ tail -f FILE | logtop

is the friendly version of this whole situation:

$ watch 'tail FILE | sort | uniq -c | sort -gr'

same energy, way less typing, way more main character. no cap. 🫶

💅 OPTIONS 💅

  • -s, --size=K — only keep K lines in memory, instead of the default 10000. memory said "i'm full" and we said "understood, queen." 🎀
  • -q, --quiet — do not display a live view of the data, only display a top at exit. shy girlie mode. 🤫
  • -l, --line-by-line=K — print the result line by line, in a machine friendly format, and K is the number of results to print per line. yes this is for when a script is the one reading, not your eyeballs. 🤖

the line by line format is: [%d %f %s\t]*\n

  • %d : Number of occurences
  • %f : Frequency of apparition
  • %s : String (Control chars replaced by dots.)
note the typo in "occurences" is load-bearing, i'm keeping it exactly as the manual says, don't come for me 💀
  • -i, --interval=K — interval between graphical updates, in seconds. Defaults to 1. so it refreshes once a second unless you tell it otherwise. ⏰
  • -h, --help — Show summary of options. your little safety net bestie. 🙈
  • -v, --version — Show version of program. flex the version number. 👑

🌈 EXAMPLES 🌈

Here are some logtop usage examples. grab a snack, this is the fun part. 🍓

tail -f cache.log | grep -o "HIT\|MISS" | logtop

Realtime hit / miss ratio on some caching software log file. obsessed. ✨

tail -f access.log | cut -d' ' -f1 | logtop -s 10000

Realtime most querying IPs on your server, as long as log lines in access.log starts with the client IP. 🔥

tail -f access.log | cut -d' ' -f7 | logtop -s 10000

Realtime most requested web pages in a NCSA like log file. the people have spoken and they want the same page over and over, iykyk. 📄

cat auth.log | grep -v "CRON" | grep -o ": .*" | logtop -q -s 100000

Display a one-shot simple analyse of your auth.log. no live view, just the receipts at the end. 💀

🦋 SEE ALSO 🦋

go give it a lil visit, it's the ancestor of this whole thing. 🫶

🎀 AUTHOR 🎀

logtop was written by Julien Palard. 👑

This manual page was written by Julien Palard <julien@palard.fr>, for the Debian project (and may be used by others). so generous, so iconic. 🌸

and that's the whole page bestie! this was version LOGTOP(1), dated April 16, 2011 — yes it's an elder but she's still serving 💅✨ bye bye, go pipe something into it fr fr 🎀💖

📦 where this page comes from