Mac Geekery

With the advent of RSS readers that can use so-called “local feeds” for various reasons, it was inevitable that some code monkey would convert his 250K system.log file to RSS.

Hello.

Perl is my language of choice here. I’m sure you have your own opinion of what language to use for tasks like this, and you can stuff it. I chose Perl.

The goal is very simple. We need to take a line, pretty it up into pieces, and then make an RSS item out of it. Then slap an RSS header and footer onto the file and present it to the user to do with as he pleases.

Attached is said file. Read over it, run it, have fun. I’m not here to teach you how to write Perl. What I am going to do is show you how to have fun with it. Given the attached script, run it once and redirect the output to a file:

log2rss.pl /var/log/syslog.log 500 > syslog.xml

Now load the file in your reader. This will vary per reader. Here, I use Pulp Fiction 1.2 because it’s drop-dead simple to add a static RSS file to it. Others require you to re-run the script or serve it locally in your Sites folder (also a possibility for older/other readers that do not support local feeds). To add it to PF 1.2 … drag it into your Subscriptions window. You’re done.

So now that you have a feed going, you want to update it. Well, we’re obviously going to use cron for this. Either get Cronnix or the like or edit your crontab file in Terminal. If you know how, you know how.

For a syslog.log feed you’re going to run into a tradeoff. It gets content fast-ish, but is also large and mildly expensive to parse. Choose a time that won’t burden your system too much. I chose 30 minutes, myself.