How the fuck do you actually tail log files?

Like i want the whole log. Not only from today, not *.log.1 and *.log, i want to run the *whole* log ever done, even the gzipped shit, through tail | grep.

Then why would you use tail instead idk, cat? Tail is really just to show the end of the file.

@gathurian i'm using tail to follow the whole thing live. cat would do the job, too, but how to view a concatenated output of all the .log, .log.1,2,3,... and .log.gz, .log.gz.1,2,3,... files?

Haven't used it, but heard of multitail.

If your problem is more like following the files through log rotation consider just using '-F' option.

@nitwhiz If you want to follow it, why would you want to see the wgole damn file? Do I understand rhis correctly that you want a live updated log on the standard output/terminal? Like tail -f but instead of the last 20 lines it's the whole file?

@gathurian you can tell tail to output the whole file before following, you know that?
I want the whole log ever happened. Through log rotation you get a few log files and a few gz ones. I hoped for an easy way to actually read these 4 different kinds of file name patterns in one go, ordered by their timestamps.

@phorkyas gotta look into that.

How about:
tail -f -n +1 some.log

Srsly, whats the point to dump all the history to stdout if you only need to tail? It's not like you're gonna read those first 180mln lines...

How does one *actually* tails a file? One runs ´tail <file>´ or ´tail -F <file>´

@Commodore did that to print the whole file.

@netikras i want to grep the whole apache access log for something specific. After 2 weeks of runtime and low access counts that's actually not much in those files, the grepped result is going to be a few lines.

@nitwhiz
grep != tail

zegrep -RHn "my_pattern" rotated_logs.gz*
egrep -RHn "my_pattern" live_logs*

sometimes zegrep recognizes non-gzipped files as well

@netikras i piped tail into grep. So i can see live results, grepped.

Thanks for your answer though.