Need help building Dashboard widget that displays Log file

[Kruzekova]

I need a widget that displays the last 5 lines of a text logfile that is made from a bash script. The output of this script to the logfile is quite simple:

Tue Jan  1 04:29:43 MST 2013 4.2.2.2 Ping FAILED
Tue Jan  1 04:29:56 MST 2013 8.8.8.8 Ping FAILED
Tue Jan  1 04:30:09 MST 2013 8.8.4.4 Ping FAILED
Tue Jan  1 04:30:11 MST 2013 ALL PINGS FAILED
Tue Jan  1 04:30:11 MST 2013 REQUESTING REBOOT…
Tue Jan  1 04:30:11 MST 2013 DSL MODEM REBOOTING!

I can get this in a shell with  tail -5 /var/logfile.log  but I'm not sure how to do this in a widget format.

Thank you

[jimp]

There are several widgets that display logs, some more complex than others. Have a look at the snort widget (in packages), havp widget (also in packages), and firewall logs widget.

What you're after would be easier than those, they do a bit of parsing before displaying, but you could perhaps use them as a basis for what you're trying to accomplish.

Or at least to see how widgets work in general.

[Kruzekova]

Thank you. I looked at the code for those widgets and learned how to make my own. It is quite simple:

$file = "/var/log/DSLModemUptimeMonitor.log";
$contents = file($file);
$string = array_slice($contents,-6);
$string1 = array_reverse($string);

?>

| 
                        # havp version
              echo implode("
", $string1);
          ?>
         |

[jimp]

Very good, nice and simple :-)

Eventually we'll probably have a general-purpose log widget that lets someone choose any of the files in /var/log to show in a widget. Shouldn't be too hard to do, but it's one of those things that nobody has thought to take the time for yet.