Note that "tail -f" can cause major CPU consumption on "larger" files on some platforms. I've seen it on Solaris at least... Rich -----Original Message----- From: oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:oracle-l-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Radoulov, Dimitre Sent: Thursday, November 02, 2006 3:33 PM To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: My 10 liner alert log monitoring WORKING shell Script !!! Comments Please !!!! > Actually its 20 lines, > I did some initial tests, seems to be working fine. > Appreciate your comments and feedback, suggestions [...] Just another point of view: I would use a kind of daemon. tail -f alert.log | while read error; do case "$error" in ORA-*) printf "%s\n" "$ORACLE_SID" "$(date)" "$error" | mailx -s "$ORACLE_SID : ${error:0:8}" email@xxxxxxxxxxx ;; esac done Just remember to restart the daemon if you remove/move the log :) Regards Dimitre P.S. The ${var:start:lenght} syntax is a valid for ksh93 and bash > 2.0, if I recall correctly. -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l -- //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l