Question

I want to write a php script that keeps the apache_log file open and “listen” to the log and deal with each log entry as it happens.

I’m thinking that I need to open a file, get the number of lines, then do this again in a loop – and when the size is different, read the new lines and process them.

Am I barking up the wrong tree, or is there a silly easy solution that I have missed?

Chris

Answer 1

The quick-and-dirty way would be to use tail -f somehow (assuming it’s available):

You could pipe the output in to PHP: tail -f file | php myscript.php, and then read from php://stdin.

Or, you could use popen in the script itself:

$res = popen('tail -f file_name', 'r');

while (!feof($res)) {
  $line = fgets($res);
  echo $line;
}