RE: Question Re: Piping and Redirection

I think you're missing the point.   The point of this thread (IMHO) is
that the Unix shell allows you a great deal of flexibility.   Not that any
one particular Unix utility is needed.

I think the tail thing was just one example.

Don't get me wrong...  both systems have their strengths and weaknesses.
The Unix command-line is much more flexible... simply by piping commands,
you can do all sorts of useful and imaginitive things that make your life
easier.   However, OS/400 is much more user-friendly.   Just about
everything that OS/400 does is done very well...  but it's somewhat
'rigid' you can only do what they designed it to do.   In Unix, many
things are done well.   Some things aren't.   But, it's very, very
flexible...  by combining the functions of many small programs, you have a
huge amount of flexibility.

But, simply taking one example and implementing it on OS/400 doesn't make
it all work.  You need the whole paradigm to be used throughout...


On Thu, 21 Nov 2002, Metz, Zak wrote:

> Reading this debate day in and day out has be thinking about writing a
> damn tail program. There's no question that it could be done. Perhaps a
> first pass would be a message queue monitor that updates automatically
> and dynamically adjusts filtering to the user's specifications. Next
> step, a DB monitor?
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: James Rich [mailto:james@eaerich.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, November 20, 2002 5:43 PM
> To: midrange-l@midrange.com
> Subject: RE: Question Re: Piping and Redirection
>
>
> On Thu, 21 Nov 2002, Evan Harris wrote:
>
> > I'm still mystified as to why you would want to watch the log files. Seems
> > to me that constantly watching them would be more disruptive than getting a
> > break message  - especially when you can't easily filter the log by a
> > severity level. Or can you ?
>
> When using tail to monitor files (log files or any other file) you can
> filter what you want by piping with grep:
>
> tail -f /my/file | grep "string to watch for"
>