OS X Console

I have for sometime used a little useful feature of Mac OS X. I dunno if a lot folks know about it. It's a simple thing, so I'll keep this short.

I do a lot of web and server programming. Debugging servers usually involves lots of logs. As such, I spend a lot of time examining things using tail -f foo.log in terminals. However, on my PowerBook, there's a useful alternative that I use a bit more often: Console.app.

This is the utility that Apple ships to view the system logs (the console.log is pretty useful when diagnosing some application issues). It's more or less the equivalent of the Microsoft Windows Event Viewer, except that Mac OS X keeps it's logs in text rather than as binary data that requires a special viewer to examine. Anyway, I was using the console.log to debug an app once several months ago and noticed a "Open..." option in the File menu. You can use this to open any text file on the disk, which is very handy when you've got logs in your home directory for development and such.

Anyway, I find myself frequently using this instead of tail -f for it's filtering features and that it's not consuming a terminal that I keep wanting to use to run other commands in.

Cheers.