Comments on: FtpTail – Monitor the tail of a file via FTP

By: Will Moffat

Will Moffat — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 18:59:19 +0000

Hi Pranav, thanks for the patch. Do you use GitHub? I was planning to move ftptail there so it’s easier for others to improve it.

By: Pranav Tekchand

Pranav Tekchand — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 11:41:19 +0000

Thanks for the great script. I used it to ftptail a log which had exploded to a gigabyte on a site.
Some hosts allow multiple domains/sub-domains and give user names like ‘subdomain@domain’ while the ftp host is still ‘subdomain’ making the argument to the script look like subdomain@domain@subdomain (or anotherDomain@originalDomain@anotherDomain). The split at the first @ doesn’t work in that case. A quick change to support that could be the diff pasted below. It adds a -u or –user-name= option. Usage changes to
will@hamstersoup.com/robots.txt
OR
-u will hamstersoup.com/robots.txt
Diff:
20a21
> -u, –user-name=U Use the user name U to login (Use if you have an @ in it)
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> my $userNameCL=”";
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> ‘u|user-name=s’ => \$userNameCL,
75,76c78
< my $url = shift @ARGV || &usage('You must specify a URL to tail. Example: will@hamstersoup.com/robots.txt');
my $url = shift @ARGV || &usage(‘You must specify a URL to tail. Example: will@hamstersoup.com/robots.txt OR -u will hamstersoup.com/robots.txt’);
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> if($userNameCL) {
> $url =~ /([^\/]+)\/(.+)/ || die “Malformed URL? Cannot extract host/file from $url. user=[$userNameCL] host=[$2] file=[$3]\n”;
> ($username,$host,$file)=($userNameCL,$1,$2);
> }
> else {
> $url =~ /([^@]+)\@([^\/]+)\/(.+)/ || die “Malformed URL? Cannot extract user\@host/file from $url. user=[$1] host=[$2] file=[$3]\n”;
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> }

By: Moorglade

Moorglade — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 20:53:40 +0000

Marvelous! I was about to try and hack something together to do exactly this, but thought I’d do a google search first. First hit, and works like a charm.

You’ve just saved me several hours of fighting with perl – thanks

By: Jim

Jim — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 22:19:28 +0000

Gold friggin’ start for you! I have a webhost that doesn’t rotate it’s weblogs or allow SSH. This is absolutely perfect and is working like a champ. Thank you very very much!

By: ngbakes

ngbakes — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 21:31:29 +0000

Hi,
I’d just like to ask, as you know perl, and scripting, and I don’t etc etc
do you know of a way I could add ftptail start ftptail status commands?

By: Laurent’s blog » ftptail

Laurent’s blog » ftptail — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 01:31:13 +0000

[...] The script is thoroughly explained on his blog entry. [...]

By: James Baker

James Baker — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 18:04:00 +0000

Oh, I thought I was doing something wrong. Is the period stderr?
I’ll try straightforward >out, and see how that goes.
If it works, thanks for the heads up.

By: Will Moffat

Will Moffat — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 14:36:51 +0000

Hi James, I don’t quite understand why you need to redirect STDERR to your file as well. But that’s not important.

If you look through the perl code you will see two ways that I print to standard error:
warn “some info”
print STDERR “more info”

Just delete anything you don’t want to appear. For example, line 177
print STDERR ".";

Hope that solves your problem.
–Will

By: James Baker

James Baker — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 13:30:15 +0000

I know that this post is quite old, but I am not a programmer and would like some help.I use ftptail to access an ftp logfile for my gameserver.

Basically, I have a bot (bigbrotherbot.com) that is a series of python scripts that read the logfile, and communicate with the gameserver via rcon. It warns and bans for stuff like swearing, spamming, recruiting, etc. However, the normal version needs to be run on the same server as the game. I use ftptail to make the logfile local. It works fine, except for one irratating error:
Every second (the sleep interval I have set) it gets the last 10 lines. If there is not any new lines, it writes a period. bigbrotherbot records this as an error, giving me a syntax error every second.
Since the syntax errors are compuslory for this level of logging (it records important error messages as well), is there any way you could remove the recording of the period at every update, or make it an option?

Also, a hint for those wanting to save the output from this: after the commands, insert >[outputfilename] 2>&1 This saves it to the outputfilename.

By: Sven

Sven — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 18:45:18 +0000

hi will,
works ok now with subdomain, user with dash unchecked till now. main functionality: rockin.
thanks for your quick fix.
sven