[tip] lnav recurse into /var/log excluding a directory

[CaffeineAddict]

lnav is awesome live log reader, but if your distro is providing you with version older than v0.12 (e.g. Debian) then using the -r flag to recurse into /var/log will not work well because version older than 0.12 will stuck reading /var/log/journal directory due to a bug.

Ideally you use lnav to recurse into /var/log like this:

sudo lnav -r /var/log

The above will not work because it will stuck recursing into /var/log/journal directory.
The objective is to exclude /var/log/journal directory from command line, but lnav does not provide us with such option, so now what?

Here is my solution how to recurse and exclude /var/log/journal directory:

sudo lnav -r $(ls /var/log/*/ -d | grep -v journal) $(find /var/log -maxdepth 1 -type f)

I hope you find this command useful, if so add it to your ~/.bash_aliases like this:

alias lnav-all='sudo lnav -r $(ls /var/log/*/ -d | grep -v journal) $(find /var/log -maxdepth 1 -type f)'

Then in new terminal simply run lnav-all

---

Irrespective of lnav bug, this command is useful to selectively exclude directories even if you use latest version of lnav because there is no option to exclude directories with -r recurse flag.