Apache Commons IO Tailer example

Question

I am working on a monitoring program that reads the /var/log/auth.log file. I am using Apache Commons IO Tailer class to read the file in real time. To get started, I wanted to test the real-time reading part on a simple file, and manually enter some code in the console line. Here is my code:

public class Main {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        TailerListener listener = new MyListener();
        Tailer tailer = Tailer.create(new File("log.txt"), listener, 500);
        while(true) {

        }
    }
}

public class MyListener extends TailerListenerAdapter {
    @Override
    public void handle(String line) {
        System.out.println(line);
    }
}

And from the terminal : sudo echo "Hello" >> log.txt The problem is when I try to write manually something in the file, it does not print it in the console. I tried to find a concrete example of usage of Tailer class, but no luck. What am I doing wrong here?

Answer 1

Your code should work. For me, this does works as expected.

package de.lhorn.stackoverflowplayground;

import java.io.File;
import org.apache.commons.io.input.Tailer;
import org.apache.commons.io.input.TailerListenerAdapter;

public class App {

    private static final int SLEEP = 500;

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        App app = new App();
        app.run();
    }

    private void run() throws InterruptedException {
        MyListener listener = new MyListener();
        Tailer tailer = Tailer.create(new File("/tmp/log.txt"), listener, SLEEP);
        while (true) {
            Thread.sleep(SLEEP);
        }
    }

    public class MyListener extends TailerListenerAdapter {

        @Override
        public void handle(String line) {
            System.out.println(line);
        }

    }
}

Answer 2

Based on my testing, Tailer will only print a line when you've added a newline to the file. So try sudo echo "Hello\n" >> log.txt

Also note that if you call create, you start a thread but have no handle on it. Hence why you had to have a while/true loop.

You could try this instead:

public static void main(String[] args) {
    TailerListener listener = new MyListener();
    Tailer tailer = new Tailer(new File("log.txt"), listener, 500);        
    tailer.run();
}