Tail logs and use grep to exclude specific lines

Question

I have this line that appears every minute in my log file:

2016-03-29 21:52:46,226 INFO     200 GET /api/ping (0.0.0.0) 0.34ms

I want to tail this log file without showing these lines.

I tried:

tail -f log.txt | grep -v "ping"

The solution has been written a couple of times in the context of other shell commands. You should look for "stdbuf" in the upper right corner of this web page. — Gombai Sándor, Mar 30, 2016 at 15:18
What is the problem? Just tried this on my machine and it works as expected. echo "..GET /api/ping (0.." | grep -v "ping" yelids a 1 result with no matches. — Matt Clark, Mar 30, 2016 at 15:29
@MattClark echo sthing is easy because its output is finished and flushed. A continuous pipe means buffering which is usually a friend but when waiting for the buffer to fill and flush means an impact on the process, it's an ugly enemy. Luckily, it can be tamed with stdbuf among a couple of options. — Gombai Sándor, Mar 30, 2016 at 19:25
even still, tail -n 0 -f test | grep -v "ping" and run this in another terminal echo "..GET /api/ping (0.." >> test still result in no output. I've tested this on 4 different unix distros, and cygwin on windows. All have the same expected behavior. — Matt Clark, Mar 30, 2016 at 20:40

Rhyuk · Accepted Answer · 2016-03-30 15:22:20Z

0

You could do something like this:

tail -F ~/Your.log | while read LINE;do

if [[ ! "$LINE" =~ "ping" ]]; then

   echo $LINE 

done
fi
done

answered Mar 30, 2016 at 15:22

Rhyuk

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