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Glogg is a fast cross-platform log file explorer

If you are a system, web or network administrator, chance is that you will sometimes have to open log files on your system to analyze their contents, for instance to troubleshoot errors that users are getting.

While you can open log files in plain text editors, not every editor is suited for that. The default Windows editor Notepad for instance has a maximum size limit, and others may also deteriorate in performance if you load large logs.

You may notice performance issues while loading the log file into the application, when you scroll the data, use the search functionality, or when you try to copy it.

Glogg is a cross-platform log file explorer that has been designed with accessibility in mind. It loads large log files as if they were small Kilobyte-sized documents, and does not sacrifice interface responsiveness either. This is achieved by loading the file directly from disk and not into memory.

glogg

The interface of the program is bare bones, but that does not mean that it is not sufficient for your tasks. The log file itself takes up the larger part of the interface.

You can scroll using the keyboard or mouse, and copy any selected log entries to the clipboard using Ctrl-C or by right-clicking on the selection and selecting the copy menu item from the context menu.

The lower half displays a search field and results pane. You can enter words or phrases here and search for them. If you search for php or 404 for instance, all matching lines of the log will be displayed in the results pane.

The program highlights each hit in the upper pane as well, and selecting a result entry will jump to it directly so that you see the previous and next log entries as well directly.

While that is useful in itself, support for regular expressions and wildcards is what makes Glogg shine.

Grogg supports other features of interest. You can define filters that highlight matching lines in the log file with a different text or background color.

To highlight all MySQL errors in red, you would simply add that filter to Glogg and the program would do the rest for you.

A set of keyboard shortcuts are available that you can use for certain activities. From using the arrow keys to scroll up or down to jump directly to a line in the log file by typing it followed by g.

You can find out more about those extra features on the documentation page.

Verdict

Glogg is an easy to use program to load, search and browse log files. It is available for several operation systems, very fast in terms of load times, and supports several advanced features such as regular expressions or filters that improve its feature set significantly.

This article was first seen on ComTek's "TekBits" Technology News

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