cleartail

A version of tail for debugging system logs that are many, many, many lines long. Installation

• Simply copy cleartail.sh anywhere you want.
• Create a alias in your .bashrc (or equivalent) to cleartail.sh.
• source (or .) your .bashrc
• Use the alias-ed command

Simply use as you would tail

cleartail myfile.log

This will clear the file first, before tailing it, allowing you to capture only the log output from that particular action (for instance trying to start a Tomcat deployed webapp).