tail -f for windows

Here’s a simple implementation of “tail -f” UNIX command equivalent in python. I used it a lot on windows servers to monitor log files. The good thing is that it works over SMB (windows shares).

#!/usr/bin/env python
import sys, os, time

def main(argv):
	if len(argv)<2:
		print "Usage: tail filename.log"
		exit(1)
	try:
		fp = open(argv[1], "r")
		st_results = os.stat(argv[1])
		st_size = st_results[6]
		fp.seek(st_size)

		while 1:
			where = fp.tell()
			line = fp.readline()
			if not line:
				time.sleep(1)
				fp.seek(where)
			else:
				print line,
		fp.close()
	except:
		fp.close()

if __name__=="__main__":
	main(sys.argv)

This is useful when starting/stopping remote services with Windows Service Controller:

sc \\server1 stop "Macromedia JRun4 default Server"
sc \\server1 start "Macromedia JRun4 default Server"