Reading Chat Logs with Awk

Second Life can be asked to stream logs of chats and IM to files in a special directory. We can abuse this with some unix utilities to have messages spoken out loud (ensuring we don't miss on important conversations.)

# read comments as they are appended to the log; starting with zero lines of context
tail -n0 -f  |
# deletes all the content between message start through the second colon
awk -F: '{$1=""; $2=""; print; fflush(stdout)}' |
# speaks the text out loud
espeak

• Blog comment on erasing fields by assigning them to nothing
• Stack Exchange on how to flush Awk's output