Question

I have an application which generates logs in append mode, but the logs are not timestamped.

Is it possible to use tail -f with some option, or a perl script to monitor writes to this file and prefix them with a timestamp?

Given that I am running Windows without Cygwin, could I avoid using bash or any other Unix shell?

Answer 1

if you are using GNU tail, then you should be able to use GNU gawk.

C:\test>tail -F file  | gawk.exe "{s=systime(); print strftime(\"%Y-%m-%d:%H:%M:%S\",s),$0}"