Adding tail to Windows context menu.

nospam@example.com (John J Thomas) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 08:59:31 -0700

Many developers in the UNIX world have known for years, about a little utility called tail. Essentially tail would allow you too watch live log files by displaying the last 10 lines or so of any log file, actively updating the display as the log file was written to. Typically while at a bash or cshell prompt developers would type in, for instance if troubleshooting a web app, tail -f /usr/usr001/logs/httpd.log.

Eventually tail was ported over to run under the Windows environment. This was awesome, but still required one to be at a dos prompt and to have to specify the full path to the log file you wish to tail. And as you would imagine, in an increasingly visual world, this was becoming more and more difficult. Well, no more. With this quick registry edit, you can instantly add Tail to Windows context-menu for text files (this includes any plain text format such as txt, diz, log, .properties, whatever).

First, I've created a folder on my c:\drive called C:\BIN. I keep many DOS based and ported Unix-based utilities like grep in this folder. So for me tail.exe exists at c:\bin\tail.exe on my local hard-drive, with that in mind I simply created a new text file, using notepad, containing the following text:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\txtfile\shell\Tail]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\txtfile\shell\Tail\Command]
@ = "\"C:\\bin\\tail.exe\" -f \"%1\""

I then saved it as a TAIL.REG.

Once I saved it I browsed to it and double-clicked on it. Windows will warn you of the evil dangers of merging a REG file into your system registry, once you agree, thats it. Tail will now show up as an option whenever you right-click on a file that adhears to plain text formatting. I use it daily now.

You can download tail from

Sourceforge
http://tailforwin32.sourceforge.net/

Microsoft includes their own in the Windows Server 2003 RKT
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/

John's Blog - Windows Tips

Adding tail to Windows context menu.

You can download tail from