This may not be the most elegant way to monitor your system logs but at least you won’t need to run multiple shells. Using the GNU version of the tail command, you can view more than one log file on the screen and keep them updated in real time without interaction. Other versions of tail can only display one log at a time.
zcat broken on Mac OS X: Feature or bug?
Apparently on Mac OS X 10.4.7 (and earlier), the zcat command doesn’t work. zcat is a very useful util to read through gzip-archived system logs and usually works by just typing zcat /path/to/log.gz
However, it appears to be broken on the Mac. For example, this is actual output:
[user@host:~] zcat /var/log/system.log.0.gz
zcat: /var/log/system.log.0.gz.Z: No such file or directory
[user@host:~] zcat -S .gz /var/log/system.log.0.gz
zcat: /var/log/system.log.0.gz.Z: No such file or directoryMicrosoft CEO and engineers called in to exorcise Windows
To illustrate how badly Microsoft Windows is designed, Australian IT magazine has a humorous article regarding Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's troubleshooting session for a friend. Apparently Ballmer was attending a wedding and the bride's father had asked him to troubleshoot his Windows PC at home. Of course, Ballmer volunteered to check it out because he loves the OS so much… and after two days gave up. He called in the engineers at Microsoft headquarters and together they found the system crippled by malware and corrupted settings, some of which were irreparable.