ngauthier / watch_me

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= Watch Me =
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Nick Gauthier (nick@smartlogicsolutions.com)

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= Purpose =
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The purpose of watch me is to allow developers to watch multiple log files at once in a single
terminal. This is very useful when viewing logs over SSH because you don't have to open multiple
sessions in order to watch multiple logs.

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= Usage =
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Using watch_me is very simple:

Usage: watch_me.rb -l lines -r refresh file1 [file2 file3 ...]
       lines: number of rows to use, a.k.a. height of console. Default 24.
       refresh: refresh interval in seconds. Default 4

The lines option is important if you want to make full use of your terminal space. Set this value
to the number of rows that your terminal is sized to display. This defaults to 24, as many terminals
open in 80x24 by default.

The refresh option is the number of seconds between each log refresh.

The number of lines to display per file is automatically calculated using the number of files and
the number of lines for the entire application.

watch_me uses tail in order to view the most recent log entries.

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= Examples =
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For a simple example, perform the following actions:

1) Open 3 terminal windows in the watch_me directory
2) In the first terminal, run:
   $ ./examples/rander.rb > rander.1.log
3) In the second terminal, run:
   $ ./examples/rander.rb > rander.2.log
4) In the third terminal, run:
   $ ./watch_me.rb rander.1.log rander.2.log
   
The rander script outputs random numbers to stdout. This allows you to watch the output of both
programs simultaneously.