rare

A fast text scanner/regex extractor and realtime summarizer. Quickly search, reformat and visualize text files such as logs, csv, json, etc.

Supports various CLI-based graphing and metric formats (filter (grep-like), histogram, table, bargraph, heatmap, reduce).

rare is a play on "more" and "less", but can also stand for "realtime aggregated regular expressions".

See rare.zdyn.net or the docs/ folder for the full documentation.

Features

• Multiple summary formats including: filter (like grep), histogram, bar graphs, tables, heatmaps, reduce, and numerical analysis
• File glob expansions (eg /var/log/* or /var/log/*/*.log) and -R
• Optional gzip decompression (with -z)
• Following -f or re-open following -F (use --poll to poll, and --tail to tail)
• Ignoring lines that match an expression (with -i)
• Aggregating and realtime summary (Don't have to wait for all data to be scanned)
• Multi-threaded reading, parsing, and aggregation (It's fast)
• Color-coded outputs (optionally)
• Pipe support (stdin for reading, stdout will disable realtime, and --csv formatting) eg. tail -f | rare ... > out

Take a look at examples to see more of what rare does.

Output Formats

Output formats include:

• filter is grep-like, in that each line will be processed and the extracted key will be output directly to stdout
• histogram will count instances of the extracted key
• table will count the key in 2 dimensions
• heatmap will display a color-coded version of the strength of a cell in a dense format
• bargraph will create either a stacked or non-stacked bargraph based on 2 dimensions
• analyze will use the key as a numeric value and compute mean/median/mode/stddev/percentiles
• reduce allows evaluating data using expressions, and grouping/sorting the output

More details on various output formats and aggregators (including examples) can be found in aggregators

Installation

Bash Script

This script downloads the latest version from github, and installs it to ~/.local/bin (/usr/bin if root).

curl -sfL https://rare.zdyn.net/install.sh | bash

Manual (Prebuilt Binary)

Download appropriate binary or package from Releases

Homebrew

brew tap zix99/rare
brew install rare

Community Contributed

The below install methods have been contributed by the community, and aren't maintained directly.

MacPorts

sudo port selfupdate
sudo port install rare

From code

Clone the repo, and:

Requires GO 1.18 or higher

go mod download

# Build binary
go build .

# OR, with experimental features
go build -tags experimental .

Available tags:

• experimental Enable experimental features (eg. fuzzy search)
• pcre2 Enables PCRE 2 (v10) where able. Currently linux only
• rare_no_pprof Disables profiling capabilities, which reduces binary size
• urfave_cli_no_docs Disables man and markdown documentation generation, which reduces binary size

A Note on PCRE (Perl Compatible Regex Library)

Besides your standard OS versions, there is an additional pcre build which is ~4x faster than go's re2 implementation in moderately complex cases. In order to use this, you must make sure that libpcre2 is installed (eg apt install libpcre2-8-0). Right now, it is only bundled with the linux distribution.

PCRE2 also comes with pitfalls, two of the most important are:

1. That rare is now dynamically linked, meaning that you need to have libc and libpcre installed
2. That pcre is an exponential-time algorithm (re2 is linear). While it can be significantly faster than go's re2, it can also be catastropically slower in some situations. There is a good post here that talks about regexp timings.

I will leave it up to the user as to which they find suitable to use for their situation. Generally, if you know what rare is getting as an input, the pcre version is perfectly safe and can be much faster.

Documentation

All documentation may be found here, in the docs/ folder, by running rare docs (embedded docs/ folder), or on the website rare.zdyn.net

You can also see a dump of the CLI options at cli-help.md

Example

Create histogram from sample data

$ cat input.txt
1
2
1
3
1
0

$ rare histo input.txt
1                   3         
0                   1         
2                   1         
3                   1         

Matched: 6 / 6 (Groups: 4)

Extact status and size from nginx logs

$ rare filter -n 4 -m "(\d{3}) (\d+)" -e "{1} {2}" access.log
404 169
404 169
404 571
404 571
Matched: 4 / 4

Extract status codes from nginx logs

$ rare histo \
    -m '"(\w{3,4}) ([A-Za-z0-9/.]+).*" (\d{3})' \ # The regex that extracts match-groups
    -e '{3} {1}' \ # The expression will be the key, referencing the match-groups
    access.log     # One or more files (or -R for recursion)

200 GET                          160663
404 GET                          857
304 GET                          53
200 HEAD                         18
403 GET                          14

More Examples

For more examples, check out the docs or the website

Performance Benchmarking

I know there are different solutions, and rare accomplishes summarization in a way that grep, awk, etc can't, however I think it's worth analyzing the performance of this tool vs standard tools to show that it's at least as good.

See benchmarks for comparisons between common tools like grep | wc, silversearcher-ag, etc.

Development

New additions to rare should pass the following checks

• Documentation for any new functionality or expression changes
• Before and after CPU and memory benchmarking for core additions (Expressions, aggregation, benchmarking, and rendering)
• Limit memory allocations (preferably 0!) in the high-throughput functions
• Tests, and if it makes sense, benchmarks of a given function

Running/Testing

go run .
go test ./...

Profiling

New high-throughput changes should be performance benchmarked.

To Benchmark:

go run . --profile out <your test code>
go tool pprof -http=:8080 out.cpu.prof # CPU
go tool pprof -http=:8080 out_num.prof # Memory

License

Copyright (C) 2019  Christopher LaPointe

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.