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+---
+layout: post
+title: "Competing with 'tail -f'"
+date: 2013-09-10 00:00:00
+excerpt: The standard utilities are tough competition.
+---
+
+Probably the toughest competition for lnav is the standard Unix utilities like
+tail, grep, less, and emacs/vim. It can be hard trying to convince people that
+these built-in commands that they've used for forever can be improved upon. The
+advanced features of lnav might even work against it since folks are expecting
+to have to learn a bunch of stuff to see any benefits.
+
+The reality is that there are quite a few "passive" features in lnav that can
+provide value with no effort required by the user. For example, lnav can easily
+replace 'tail -f', it's even shorter to type! Beyond the basic task of
+displaying new lines appended to a log file, you also get to see log messages
+from multiple files interleaved, the ability to scroll backwards, syntax
+highlighting, live searching, and so on. These basic features do not have the
+same "wow" factor as executing a SQL query over data automatically extracted
+from a log file, but they're the features that get used 90% of the time.
+
+Anyways, I think I'm gaining a new appreciation for marketing/sales...