I just found a couple cool programs called turbotail and multitail while searching for rbot using eix.
Turbotail is just like tail, but it uses dnotify instead of auto refreshing a defined number of seconds. I always thought it was kind of silly to keep refreshing the screen searching for new content with tail. Turbotail just sits there until the kernel notifies of a change in the file that you are tail’ing and then it updates what you see.
Multitail looks like a VERY robust way of viewing multiple files. It can tail any number of files and supports text filtering and even syntax highlighting.
Turbotail works great, but unfortunately multitail crashes when I try to run it from my Yakuake console. I get this:
--*- multitail 5.2.0 (C) 2003-2007 by [email protected] -*--
A problem occured at line 511 in function mynewwin (from file term.c):
Failed to create window with dimensions 55x9 at offset -27,-4 (terminal size: 167,19)
Seems to work just fine from a regular console though. It will take me a while to actually learn all of the features of multitail.