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I'm trying to read a log file which is being written to by a simple daemon. I would like to filter my "live" output to certain - multiple - "types".

My types are: DEBUG|INFO|WARN|ERROR|FATAL

This is what I have so far, and it works for one case, but I cannot get it working for multiple cases though.

tail -f log.txt | grep INFO

I've tried a couple of things to try and say I want "WARN's & ERROR's", but nothing is really working for me. How would I correct this?

3 Answers 3

19

Try:

tail -f log.txt | egrep 'WARN|ERROR'
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  • 2
    +1 grep -E also works. Oct 23, 2009 at 15:23
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In addition to switching to egrep/grep -E to get the alternation operator of extended regular expressions, you can you can also use multiple -e arguments to regular grep or even fgrep/grep -F

In fact, if your searches are all static strings (like the original question), you can even ‘downgrade’ all the way to fgrep/grep -F which might give a speed boost (since it always does direct string comparisons without regexps).

fgrep -e DEBUG -e INFO -e WARN -e ERROR -e FATAL

Also POSIX allows patterns to be separated by newlines.

# bash-ish to put a newlines into the string
fgrep $'DEBUG\nINFO\nWARN\nERROR\nFATAL'

# Standard syntax, but easier to break while editing(?):
fgrep "$(for f in DEBUG INFO WARN ERROR FATAL; do echo "$f"; done)"
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This also works (regular grep and escape the pipe character):

tail -f log.txt | grep 'WARN\|ERROR'
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  • That is a GNU extension to the syntax of basic regular expressions, it probably won't work for non-GNU greps. It is more portable to use egrep or grep -E and the non-escaped alternation marker (pipe). Oct 23, 2009 at 20:05

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