Bash:Tail logs without junk characters

Question

Running tail -f /var/log/* can sometimes show junk/garbage characters and trash the screen with control codes.

What's a good way to filter those out, in order to see a clean output with minimal loss of information?

Answer 1

1. Pipe to sed, to strip out ANSI codes (those likely to trash the console).
2. Pipe to strings, to only print actual strings, because some files in /var/log/ contains binary data.

tail -f /var/log/* | sed $'s#\e[\[(][[:digit:]]*[[:print:]]##g' | strings

You can add these helper aliases to your shell profile by executing this:

cat >>~/.profile <<EOF

# ANSI codes stripping helpers
alias noansi="sed $'s#\e[\[(][[:digit:]]*[[:print:]]##g'"
alias noansistrings="noansi|strings"
EOF
. ~/.profile

Then for example, you will be able to run:

tail -f /var/log/* | noansistrings