weird behavior of log file
 

Hi All

This is my first post ;-)

I have a VERY weird log file behavior.

1) When I cat the file I can see all info inside. (to current time)
2) When I tail the file (tail -f ) I don't see the end of the file. Last info inside the file is a few days/hour old.
3) But if I do a ls -l it has the current date/time (file is being updated)
4) When I VI the file I cant go to the end of the file and get this message just as I open the file "file.log [noeol] 2444996L, 190001152C "


I have restarted the process and it fixes it for a while, but hen start acting like this again.

I cant restart the linux server as its in production (probably only in 2 weeks )

Any idea what it could be ? All other log files seems ok

Thanks
C

Has the log file been rotated? If so, the 'tail -f' may be following the old file. In that case, use 'tail -F' (capital 'F') or '--follow=name' to track the file by name not descripter.

hi macemoneta

No it did not rotate, but thanks for the -F switch :-)


Seems I wil just have to wait and do a reboot

Looks like buffering; all programs do this to some extent, and if the log file isn't being written to often, it (tail -f) can appear to be 'behind the curve'
Similarly, if the file is open and being written to, then it may well have 'noeol' = no end-of-line char.
Nothing to worry about.
According to the output, that's 2.4 million lines

Hi thanks for the reply's I found the problem, it was a mount point that was 100% full although a different process that was started up as root user could still write to same mount point. That lead me to believe it was an process/application issue.

By default the ext3, ext4 Linux fs reserves 5% for use by root on each disk to help fix issues like this and to reduce fragmentation.