Life is much easier as a developer when we have tool that make fast work of drudgery.  Every quarter I need to produce a reliability report, comparing our actual experience on out production server to our SLA (Service Level Agreement).  This once involved checking every CLICK WOMlog, looking for restarts and other glitches.  Now I use AstroGrep;  2 minutes to search 3 months of logs.

As developers we're often testing scripts on our development sites.  During debugging we write many statements to the WOMlogs, with values at intermediate steps of the process.  Reading these once meant doing a "LOG ROLL" to create a new Click application WOMlog, running the code, opening the log in Notepad, and going to the bottom to see new messages.  Now I create a share on the WOMlog directory, and from my desktop run "Tail for Win32".  It displays the tail (bottom) of the log continuously, so checking out my messages is just a matter of looking at the Tail window.

Source Forge http://sourceforge.net/ has an immense list of shareware utilities, is easily searched, and most work as advertised.  Few are perfect; can’t expect every bell and whistle from someone’s individual effort in their spare time.  But perfection is the enemy of progress, someone said.

AstroGrep is at http://sourceforge.net/projects/astrogrep/ - there are many other GREP utilities, but this one was very simple to use and worked well.  Copy it to a directory, and run it.  Select the folder to search, and entire a file name or wildcard, and let it run.  The list shows files with one or more instances of the search string.  One click and the lower window will list the occurrences; double click and the file opens on Notepad.

Tail is at http://sourceforge.net/projects/tailforwin32/.  Create a windows share to the directory, run Tail.  Create a workspace (window), and use File >> Open to put a file (WOMlog) in the workspace.  When anything is added you will see it.  TAILforWIN is a bit rough around the edges, but does the job I need. 

Both do not require an install; just download the file and run it.