(Obvious?) Linux Question.

[swestrup]

I've got a process that I'd like to monitor that, in debug mode, will issue a semi-infinite list of debug messages to stout.  What I would like to do is have it run in the background and output to some sort of ring-buffer file that only keeps the last 100K or so of output. That way I can occasionally check in on it with a tail -f command without worrying about my hard drive filling with a single huge file.

So, is there such a ring-buffer utility in Linux. I simply assumed that such a thing would exist (after all, dmesg is a ring buffer), but I've not had any luck looking for it. So, does such a file utility exist, or not?

Comments

[swestrup]

Oh, and thanks for pointing me to VRB. It seems someone has already used it to create the file-level utility I've been looking for.