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My servers hung, and after a restart it showed me that my hard drive was full (Windows Server 2008). I looked into the problem and it was a 189 GB Tomcat log file!

To find out the cause for the crash, seeing the last 100 lines of the file would be enough.

Is there a quick way to do this?

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Which version of Windows? Do the solution suggested in Windows XP equivalent of “tail -f”? help? – Dennis Feb 7 at 17:35
if it is that big I imagine it is being written to quite frequently. Just delete it then read what it writes new. – EBGreen Feb 7 at 17:44
tailforwin32 did the trick. Dennis please post as answer so I can accept it – Kossel Feb 7 at 18:09

marked as duplicate by Karan, Dave M, Tanner, Kyle, 8088 Feb 8 at 17:21

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Tail for Win32 is a GUI tool that can be used to monitor changes to a log file in real time.

screenshot

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You can also get a command line version of tail here: gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/coreutils.htm – MaQleod Feb 7 at 19:30
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You need to set up the log to rotate. As of right now, your log is just constantly appending to the end, which is causing it to grow constantly. There is a solution on the Stack Overflow website which you might want to try.

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I do have log file rotation per day, but for somehow, only that day the file goes huge (usually 300k) – Kossel Feb 7 at 17:49
did you examine the log file to see what was causing it to fill up? – Keltari Feb 7 at 17:55
that's what I want to do :) – Kossel Feb 7 at 17:57

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