Thank you for your interest in swatch: the Simple WATCHdog. Swatch was originally written to actively monitor messages as they are written to a log file via the UNIX syslog utility. For a simple demonstration type "perl swatch --examine=FILENAME" with FILENAME being the file that you would like to see the contents of. All this example will do is demonstrate the different text modes that are available with to the echo action. Read the INSTALL file for installation instructions. This is a beta release of version 3.0, so please use it with caution. The code is still slightly ahead of the documentation. IF YOU ENCOUNTER A BUG... Please send mail to eta@engr.ucsb.edu about it, but first make sure that it is not mentioned in the KNOWN_BUGS file and that you are using the latest release. You my want to try the latest snapshot which is named swatch..tar and will be updated very frequently. This will be located in the NEW directory at the FTP site. MAJOR CHANGES The configuration file now has a completely different format. You can still use your old configuration files if you use the "--old-style-config" switch if you insist. I have re-written most a lot of the code to take advantage of features and modules that were made available with perl 5. It now requires perl 5 and the following modules: Time::HiRes, Date::Calc, and File::Tail. It now uses the File::Tail module instead of the unix tail(1) command to actively monitor a file. I have added the seven colors that color xterminals recognize to the echo action. The manual is now embedded into the script in POD format. I have eliminated the use of swatch specific perl libraries. SUGGESTIONS? Please mail them to eta@engr.ucsb.edu