MTail is free for personal use and you are encouraged to donate if you plan to use the program in a business environment. We’ve chosen a couple of tools which are quite simple to use with enough options for the average user. There are several programs around with varying levels of sophistication and quite a few have the word “Tail” in their name to reflect the fact they are doing what the Unix Tail command does. One obvious way to monitor log or text files is to use a separate tool to do it for you.

Monitor Text Files In Real Time With A Third Party Utility There’s a few ways to accomplish this task in Windows, here we show you how. With just using Notepad the file would constantly need manually closing and reopening.Ī solution is to use another method that can automatically show the contents of a text or log file in real time, much like the Tail command included in Linux and Unix.

Loading the file into Windows Notepad will show you the content of the file but it will not refresh the contents in real time to show new entries while the file is open. Sometimes you might need to monitor a text or log file to see if it is creating any error reports or failure notices while the software is running. A log file could be anything from a progress report by a small utility, to a connection activity log for your server to Windows Event log files or even Windows update logs. Whether you are a general computer user, a professional or just a hobbyist, something that gets created a lot in Windows is log files or text files that report what a particular application or built in operation has been doing.

Notepad++ written in qt