The log file navigator, lnav, is an enhanced log file viewer that takes advantage of any semantic information that can be gleaned from the files being viewed, such as timestamps and log levels.

Using this extra semantic information, lnav can do things like interleaving messages from different files, generate histograms of messages over time, and providing hotkeys for navigating through the file.

It is hoped that these features will allow the user to quickly and efficiently zero in on problems.

PREREQUISITES

The following software packages are required to build lnav:

$ spt-get install gcc/clang   libpcre   sqlite   ncurses   readline   zlib  bz2  re2c   libcurl  

 gcc/clang - A C++14-compatible compiler.
 libpcre - The Perl Compatible Regular Expression (PCRE) library.
 sqlite - The SQLite database engine. Version 3.9.0 or higher is required.
 ncurses - The ncurses text UI library.
 readline - The readline line editing library.
 zlib - The zlib compression library.
 bz2 - The bzip2 compression library.
 re2c - The re2c scanner generator.
 libcurl - The cURL library for downloading files from URLs. Version 7.23.0 or higher is required.

INSTALLATION

Lnav from APT:

 $  apt-get install lnav

USING

The only file installed is the executable, "lnav". You can execute it with no arguments to view the default set of files:

   $ lnav

You can view all the syslog messages by running:

  $  lnav /var/log/syslog

Yiew all the message system:

 $ lnav /var/log/messages*

View apache log (all)

 $ lnav /var/log/apache2/*.log