http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=680300

danmcb has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I have a log file which contains SOAP messages, and they're long. Very long. Each message ends up as a line of maybe 700 chars or so.

If this was an apache log, I would of course just do tail -f on it and use that to debug. But that won't work, it's too damn unreadable to be useful..

Of course, using perl to decode XML is a cinch. But How can I get perl to be a wrapper on tail -f, so that I can see formatted or filtered messages in real time, without all the crud?

Thank you kindly!