What if your logs looked like this?
If you sprinkle printf statements throughout your scripts, prefix output lines with asterisks. This adds lightweight structure to your log levels, and makes your log files suitable for opening in emacs org-mode.
Programmers who use Emacs and Org-Mode.
I wrote a simple Github scraper in Perl.
Given a username, the script first queries the Github API for the URLs of their repositories.
Then the script runs git clone for each repository, or git pull if the repository already exists.
If you use “printf debugging” style, you can guess that this is the sort of script that could produce reams of logging output.
Use org-mode as a logging target!
Just add asterisks, judiciously, to the start of your print output.
Tee your STDOUT/STDERR to a log.org output file.
Then open the log file in Emacs and use TAB to fold and unfold.
It’s magic.
$ mkdir gitusername
$ cd gitusername
$ git-scrape 2>&1 | tee gitusername.org
Note: the .org at the end is what tells Emacs to use org-mode. You may need to M-x org-mode.
20200620-14:36:49 mengwong@venice4:~/src% mkdir jhpyle 20200620-14:36:51 mengwong@venice4:~/src% cd jhpyle 20200620-14:36:53 mengwong@venice4:~/src/jhpyle% git-scrape 2>&1 | tee log.org * git-scrape jhpyle already in jhpyle/ * what repositories does jhpyle have? page 1 returned 29 urls page 2 returned 0 urls ** jhpyle has 29 repositories - https://github.com/jhpyle/charts.git - https://github.com/jhpyle/docacon-dot-com.git - https://github.com/jhpyle/docassemble.git - https://github.com/jhpyle/docassemble-appeal.git - https://github.com/jhpyle/docassemble-empty.git - https://github.com/jhpyle/docassemble-income.git - https://github.com/jhpyle/docassemble-LSLettersEmails.git - https://github.com/jhpyle/docassemble-monitor.git - https://github.com/jhpyle/docassemble-MotionTutorial.git - https://github.com/jhpyle/docassemble-os.git - https://github.com/jhpyle/docassemble-profileme.git - https://github.com/jhpyle/docassemble-rpi.git - https://github.com/jhpyle/docassemble-spot.git - https://github.com/jhpyle/docassemble-ssareportchangesletter.git - https://github.com/jhpyle/docassemble-suffolk.git - https://github.com/jhpyle/docassemble-testpackage.git - https://github.com/jhpyle/docassemble-testproj.git - https://github.com/jhpyle/flask-kvsession.git - https://github.com/jhpyle/lawyersongithub.git - https://github.com/jhpyle/lsreportapi.git - https://github.com/jhpyle/lstexttwilio.git - https://github.com/jhpyle/mediawiki-pla.git - https://github.com/jhpyle/mTCP.git - https://github.com/jhpyle/p5-census-us.git - https://github.com/jhpyle/pdfminer.git - https://github.com/jhpyle/pennsylvaniacao.git - https://github.com/jhpyle/python-docx-template.git - https://github.com/jhpyle/testxsendfile.git - https://github.com/jhpyle/textstat.git * cloning 29 repositories ** https://github.com/jhpyle/charts.git Cloning into 'charts'... remote: Enumerating objects: 278, done. remote: Counting objects: 100% (278/278), done. remote: Compressing objects: 100% (175/175), done. remote: Total 278 (delta 155), reused 216 (delta 95), pack-reused 0 Receiving objects: 100% (278/278), 297.19 KiB | 369.00 KiB/s, done. Resolving deltas: 100% (155/155), done.
with a hierarchy which you can TAB to fold/unfold
You can watch the logs grow in realtime if you turn on M-x auto-revert-mode and move your cursor to the end of the file.
print(“:PROPERTIES:\n:VISIBILITY: all\n:END:”);
This is a featherweight form of structured logging, sort of a substitute for log levels. For more on real structured logging (think JSON output instead of throwaway mutterings) see, e.g., https://engineering.grab.com/structured-logging