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Lnav Logfile Navigator

(lnav.org)
156 points alexzeitler | 1 comments | 17 Jun 24 09:42 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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justusthane ◴[18 Jun 24 12:55 UTC] No.40717275[source]▶
lnav is something I keep coming back to over and over really _wanting_ to like, but I've never managed to figure it out. I'm not sure exactly what the problem is, but I find the docs confusing and incomplete, and I always end up getting stuck and going back to Vim and/or VisiData.

Does anyone have any good tutorials or resources apart from the official ones?

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tstack ◴[18 Jun 24 13:30 UTC] No.40717638[source]▶
I'm the author of lnav .. and not a very good writer, apologies.

I guess my main question would be, what are you expecting to get out of lnav? I use it primarily for merging log files together and just jumping around trying to understand what was happening. It has a bunch of other functionality, like using SQL for analysis, but that's not something I use regularly.

Really, a lot of the benefits of lnav are automatic, like uncompressing files, detecting log formats, tailing... So, if that's not something that comes up for you, it might just not be the tool for you.

I actually have this "not getting it" problem with VisiData/multitail. I start them up and they don't behave like I would expect when pressing hotkeys.

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1. pinkorchid ◴[18 Jun 24 16:26 UTC] No.40719605[source]▶
Thanks for writing lnav, it's a fantastic tool. I constantly take advantage of the automatic benefits you mentioned, and also love the ability to navigate a log minute by minute, interleave multiple logs within the same timeline, navigate through errors or warnings, and how easy it is to deal with spammy logs by using filter-in and filter-out. Thanks!