Simple command to "watch" the webserver access log

Fri, Apr 2, 2010 Tweet Vote on HN I am often curious as to what bots are going on my site at any given moment. So much so that I devote one terminal tab to running this script. save the following as say bot.sh and make it executable :-

#!/bin/bash
watch "grep $1 /path/to/access.log | tail -15"

note: the number after tail can be adjusted depending on your terminal size... Run it on the server as :-

[user@server ~]# ./bot.sh Googlebot

OR

[user@server ~]# ./bot.sh msnbot

OR

[user@server ~]# ./bot.sh 

and so on.... UPDATE: Better alternative by willwill. Save as bot.sh:-

#!/bin/bash
watch "tail -f /path/to/access.log | grep $1"