mingle

Mingle

Mingle is a library and command line tool to allow you to read from many log files, line by line in chronological order.

Introduction

Mingle uses the python-dateutil module to flexibly attempt to parse the first part of each line as a datetime, and provides a generator to access the lines in total chronological order, across the input files.

It also offers a function to conveniently print the lines out in chronological order, optionally marking which files the lines come from.

A command line utility 'mingle' is also provided, to print the log file lines in chronological order from the shell.

Usage:

To access a generator that will return lines from multiple log files in chronological order::

>>> from mingle import mingled
>>> files = ['webserver-log', 'db-log', 'firewall-log']
>>> for line, filename in mingled(files):
>>>     print("The line: " + line)
>>>     print("From file:" + filename)

To conveniently print the lines to stdout::

>>> import mingle
>>> files = ['webserver-log', 'db-log', 'firewall-log']
>>> mingle.cat(files)

To print the usage of the command line interface::

user@localhost:~$ mingle -h
usage: mingle [-h] [-q] files [files ...]

Inter-mingle the contents of several log files by date stamp.

positional arguments:
  files        the files to intermingle

optional arguments:
  -h, --help   show this help message and exit
  -q, --quiet  strip the filename annotations from the output