Utilities

Excellent Utilities: lnav – the log file navigator

Last Updated on May 22, 2022

This is the second in a new series highlighting best-of-breed utilities. We’ll be covering a wide range of utilities including tools that boost your productivity, help you manage your workflow, and lots more besides. For this article, we’ll put lnav under the spotlight.

lnav is a curses-based utility for viewing and analyzing log files. The software is designed to extract useful information from log files, making it easy to perform advanced queries. Think of lnav as an enhanced log file viewer.

For many years system and kernel logs were handled by a utility called syslogd. Most Linux-based operating systems have since moved to systemd, which has a journal. That’s a giant log file for the whole system. Various software and services write their log entries into systemd’s journalctl. lnav can consume the JSON version of journalctl’s output. And it supports a wide range of other log formats. For systems running systemd-journald, you can also use lnav as the pager.

We included a couple of log analyzers in our Essential System Tools feature. And lnav wouldn’t be totally out of place in that feature. lnav is optimized for small-scale deployments.

Installation

The developers provide a generic 64-bit statically linked binary, as well as statically linked 64-bit binaries for RPM and DEB package formats. There’s also a snap available.

As the full source code is available, you can compile and install the software yourself.

$ git clone https://github.com/tstack/lnav.git
$ cd lnav
$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure
$ make -j4
$ sudo make install

The configure command didn’t initially work, as our Ubuntu system was bizarrely missing libsqlite3-dev. Installing that package with the command fixed the issue.

$ sudo apt install libsqlite3-dev

One word about the make command, the -j flag tells make that it’s instructed to spawn the provided amount of ‘threads’. Ideally each thread is executed on its own core/CPU, so your multi-core/CPU machine is used to its maximum. This speeds up compilation.

There’s no setup or configuration for lnav, and it automatically detects most log formats, so you only need to point this tool at the logfile you want to investigate.

Next page: Page 2 – In Operation

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Other Features
Page 4 – Summary


Complete list of articles in this series:

Excellent Utilities
AES CryptEncrypt files using the Advanced Encryption Standard
AnanicyShell daemon created to manage processes’ IO and CPU priorities
brootNext gen tree explorer and customizable launcher
CerebroFast application launcher
cheat.shCommunity driven unified cheat sheet
CopyQAdvanced clipboard manager
crocSecurely transfer files and folders from the command-line
DeskreenLive streaming your desktop to a web browser
dufDisk usage utility with more polished presentation than the classic df
ezaA turbo-charged alternative to the venerable ls command
Extension ManagerBrowse, install and manage GNOME Shell Extensions
fdWonderful alternative to the venerable find
fkillKill processes quick and easy
fontpreviewQuickly search and preview fonts
horcruxFile splitter with encryption and redundancy
KoohaSimple screen recorder
KOReaderDocument viewer for a wide variety of file formats
ImagineA simple yet effective image optimization tool
LanguageToolStyle and grammar checker for 30+ languages
Liquid PromptAdaptive prompt for Bash & Zsh
lnavAdvanced log file viewer for the small-scale; great for troubleshooting
lsdLike exa, lsd is a turbo-charged alternative to ls
Mark TextSimple and elegant Markdown editor
McFlyNavigate through your bash shell history
mdlessFormatted and highlighted view of Markdown files
notiMonitors a command or process and triggers a notification
NushellFlexible cross-platform shell with a modern feel
nvitopGPU process management for NVIDIA graphics cards
OCRmyPDFAdd OCR text layer to scanned PDFs
Oh My ZshFramework to manage your Zsh configuration
PaperworkDesigned to simplify the management of your paperwork
pastelGenerate, analyze, convert and manipulate colors
PDF Mix ToolPerform common editing operations on PDF files
pecoSimple interactive filtering tool that's remarkably useful
ripgrepRecursively search directories for a regex pattern
RnoteSketch and take handwritten notes
scrcpyDisplay and control Android devices
StickySimulates the traditional “sticky note” style stationery on your desktop
tldrSimplified and community-driven man pages
tmuxA terminal multiplexer that offers a massive boost to your workflow
TuskAn unofficial Evernote client with bags of potential
UlauncherSublime application launcher
WatsonTrack the time spent on projects
Whoogle SearchSelf-hosted and privacy-focused metasearch engine
ZellijTerminal workspace with batteries included
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

0 Comments
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments