Aw: RE: looking at alert log

That is a pipe, not a “wait until I’m done” and then dump output command. Both pipes and redirections “>” and “<” happen as soon as bytes dribble. If the sending program write flushes in a block size rather than each write being flushed, you CAN see a delay until the output buffer is full and flushes, but writing to the alert.log was either always individual flushed line writes or it became so by 1988.

So the answer to your question is NO.

If you wanted a single scrolling follow window AND routing the output further commands, you’d need to use something like tee as well to split standard out (and probably standard error as well).

tail –f

has been the standard lightweight (zero RDBMS engine load) way to manage filtering alert.log entries to something more urgent or a more selective repository (or both) since at least 1988.

The other ways on the thread are also useful variants. Using tail –f is slightly more complicated in the general case for alert log since the advent of being able to rotate the log file (perhaps to a dated directory) without bouncing the database, but I believe it is still a very good way to do things as Yong Huang demonstrates in his example.

And Niall’s note to use greater than instead of equals and a constant subtraction from current time answers the Brian’s question nicely and is useful especially when you are routing the results to yet another log in the database as your preferred means of keeping track of the exceptions you’ve selected for filtering.

mwf