Awesome Cygwin/Tail Hack…

I came across a great post on Lance Hankins’s weblog. It showed how to setup a right-click send-to command that allows you to right-click on files in a windows explorer window and have them open in a Cygwin window while being tailed. Lance has “pretty” screenshots and detailed instructions for setting it up so I won’t regurgitate them here.

I did have one problem with his instructions for the “special case” of files with spaces in their name/path. I found that his instructions didn’t work on my machine. The tail would launch and then the screen would immediately die.

What I did to fix it was change the batch file

from:
start “tail on path with spaces” c:\dev\cygwin\bin\tail.exe -n 1000 -f “%1”

to:
start “tail on path with spaces” c:\dev\cygwin\bin\tail.exe -n 1000 -f %1

If you missed it; all I did was remove the double-quotes from around the %1 at the end of the statement.

Read the full post on Lance’s blog.

This Post Has One Comment

  1. Lance Hankins

    Thanks for the compliments and pointing out the issue with the second variant, I fixed the entry.

    Peace 🙂

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