Reading log file w/out stopping tomcat

[Aaron Roberts]

I am running Tomcat 5.x on a winXP box. I want to read the stderro and stdout logs when Tomcat is running. I get a file is in use error, unless I stop Tomcat.
Is there anyway around this? Its making debuging a pain.
Thanks,
Aaron R>

[danny liu]

use Log4j from apache
You can easily format the output of the trace message and put the log file(e.g. debug.log) anywhere you want. No sharing problem happens.
Hope it help.
Dan

[Mike Curwen]

the other thing you (should) be able to do is install software like cygwin which gives you all sorts of unix-like abilites in Windows. Of most interest to you is "tail -f", which allows you to see real-time additions to any file.

I've done this in the past and it has worked. Mind you, that was with Tomcat 4.x. Also, I have no problems having stderr open in Textpad and having Tomcat 4.x running at the same time. Whenever I switch to Textpad from my browser, it asks if I want to reload the file, because something else has updated it. This is on Windows 2k/XP Pro. So maybe there is something different about Tomcat 5.x.

I *have* had problems deleting or copying over jar files in the WEB-INF/lib or common/lib directories on Windows whilst Tomcat was running, but never the log files.