I have some databases which log to a flat text file and I don't think that this version can log to syslog, so I'd like to stream the log file into syslog myself. I figure that keeping something like this running should work:
or
My question is whether or not there is a better way of doing this?

I think that if this process is restarted, and the logfile is always quite large, that it will read at least some of it again and duplicate that information into syslog which I'd like to avoid.

Is there a better way, some program perhaps that will remember it's position in the logfile and if crashed/restarted will pick up again from that exact point without missing anything or reinserting the same log information again, possibly also handling log truncation or rotation? Does logger -f have an intelligence on this?

if you use syslog-ng you can just use a file source (or a fifo source) and read right from it. you may have issues about rotation and such, totally depends how the output file itself works. i can't see too much wrong with your tail option again, but then you'd need to restart that if the log is rotated otherwise it'll just keep reading the same inode if the filename is changed, rather than reading the new file.

you might also like somethign swishy like splunk, which will make this al very web2.0 and slick.

ah yes, thanks, I am using syslog-ng and forgot that you can use this to source a file... oh except that it turns out this is a pathetic RHEL system which does not have syslog-ng and it doesn't look like it's in the 3rd party repos either, more trouble than it's worth to mess around on a very important database server...

I would try splunk but it's not free, the free thing they give away is crippled.

Looks like the tail logger idea is the best one at the moment...

what's I'd like is a way of more intelligently tailing the file into syslog...

the free version still generally can do more than syslog-ng, it's not cluster capable, but that was never somethign you mentioned...

for syslog-ng i use the rpm's from Dag Wieers repositories, just pick the EL4 / EL5 ones and it'll drop right in, SElinux permitting