How to read a log file which is hourly updated in c#?

Question

I'm trying to write a console app in C# which reads a log file. The problem that i'm facing is that this log file is updated every 1 hour so for example, if I had 10 lines in the beginning and afterwards 12, in my second read attempt i will have to read only the 2 newly added lines. Can you suggest me a way to do this efficiently (without the need to read all the lines again because the log file usually has 5000+ lines)?

Answer 1

First of all you can use FileSystemWatcher to have notifications after file changed.

Morover you can use FileStream and Seek function to ready only new added lines. On http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/7568/Tail-NET there is an example with Thread.Sleep:

using ( StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(new FileStream(fileName, 
                     FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read, FileShare.ReadWrite)) )
{
    //start at the end of the file
    long lastMaxOffset = reader.BaseStream.Length;

    while ( true )
    {
        System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(100);

        //if the file size has not changed, idle
        if ( reader.BaseStream.Length == lastMaxOffset )
            continue;

        //seek to the last max offset
        reader.BaseStream.Seek(lastMaxOffset, SeekOrigin.Begin);

        //read out of the file until the EOF
        string line = "";
        while ( (line = reader.ReadLine()) != null )
            Console.WriteLine(line);

        //update the last max offset
        lastMaxOffset = reader.BaseStream.Position;
    }
}