I use solaris 5.2 at work, and use a tail -f process to interactively monitor events added to the syslog file. How can I filter out events (apart from the syslog.conf file) by piping to a grep command? Thanks.

Take a look at the grep -v option.

I know that's what I would normally do, but Solaris 5.2 doesn't seem to allow piping tail -f. Normally, I would tail -f | grep -v word. But, it seems that is not allowed, so I'm looking for an alternative. Thanks.

That's strange....If it's just one word then How about

tail -f file | awk '$1 !="word"{print $0}'

(change $1 to whatever field the word appears in)

Or

tail -f file | awk '$0 !~ /word/ {print $0}'

Hope that helps.

The problem is that tail -f won't work with any pipe. I think syslog-ng, the next generation version allows filtering. We'll probably have to go with something like that.

There is no such thing as Solaris 5.2. If you're saying that you're running SunOS 5.2 (Solaris 2.2), you're quite behind, and I don't even think you can get security patches for it. Consider upgrading. Legacy software written properly should be fully supported on the newer OSes.

Thanks for the correction. You are right that it's SunOS 5.2 (still learning this stuff). As for the upgrade suggestion, I'm low on the food chain, but I'll pass the suggestion to upgrade along.