Reading Logs Made Easy With Bash.

Most of the web programmers would normally look into their applications/server error logs when they find issues, indeed it’s a pain when the log path is filled with directories, it’s sometimes annoying to do an ls -l and look for the latest directory and then cd it, a bit better case is when one tab_completes to change directories.

It would be very easy if we could cdn as in cd to the new dir ;)

So /me tired some silly script that would make my life easier, do add it to your ~/.bash.rc if we like it!

Here is the simple script to cdn :

cdn() {

local file latest; 
for file in "${1:-.}"/*; do 
    [[ $file -nt $latest ]] && latest=$file
done; 
printf '%s\n' "$latest"
[[ -d $latest ]] && cd $latest || tailf $latest

}

Usage: cdn [dir]

Digging into the code:

• Get all the file and dirs in the specified path or consider ”.” as the default path "${1:-.}"/*

• Using file and latest local vars : if $file -nt $latest True if $file is newer than $latest (according to modification date).

• Finally check if it’s a dir or file, if file cd to it else tail it!

Hope this helps you guys, as it’s helping me, happy hacking!