hello folks,

i'm trying to make a shell script that mails me when new log arrives to /var/log/auth.log

so when tail -f /var/log/messages increments its size i would receive an email with the logs....

can anyone help me? i dont want you to do it for me, just to point me in some direction....

You should probably have a look man pages for syslogd and syslog.conf. (man syslogd, man syslog.conf) as this allows for mailing.

I'd caution you against mailing EVERYTHING. Your messages are apt to have many things that you may wish to see in troubleshooting scenarios but wouldn't want to see all the time. For example you might want to see users that got authenticated near the time you started having issues but not all the time. You wouldn't really want all the detail all the time - you'd spend your whole day just reading the messages. If you really do want that kind of detail you'd be better off just opening up a window and running "tail -f /var/log/messages" - you'll see the messages as they add to the file and will reduce CPU load as you're not kicking off an email for every message.