How to tail -f the latest log file with a given pattern

I haven't tested this, but an approach that may work would be to run a background process that creates and updates a symlink to the latest log file and then you would tail -f (or tail -F) the symlink.

I believe the simplest solution is as follows:

tail -f `ls -tr | tail -n 1`

Now, if your directory contains other log files like "SystemLog" and you only want the latest "SoftwareLog" file, then you would simply include a grep as follows:

tail -f `ls -tr | grep SoftwareLog | tail -n 1`

[Edit: after a quick googling for a tool]

You might want to try out multitail - http://www.vanheusden.com/multitail/

If you want to stick with Dennis Williamson's answer (and I've +1'ed him accordingly) here are the blanks filled in for you.

In your shell, run the following script (or it's zsh equivalent, I whipped this up in bash before I saw the zsh tag):

#!/bin/bash

TARGET_DIR="some/logfiles/"
SYMLINK_FILE="SoftwareLog.latest"
SYMLINK_PATH="$TARGET_DIR/$SYMLINK_FILE"

function getLastModifiedFile {
    echo $(ls -t "$TARGET_DIR" | grep -v "$SYMLINK_FILE" | head -1)
}

function getCurrentlySymlinkedFile {
    if [[ -h $SYMLINK_PATH ]]
    then
        echo $(ls -l $SYMLINK_PATH | awk '{print $NF}')
    else
        echo ""
    fi
}

symlinkedFile=$(getCurrentlySymlinkedFile)
while true
do
    sleep 10
    lastModified=$(getLastModifiedFile)
    if [[ $symlinkedFile != $lastModified ]]
    then
        ln -nsf $lastModified $SYMLINK_PATH
        symlinkedFile=$lastModified
    fi
done

Background that process using the normal method (again, I don't know zsh, so it might be different)...

./updateSymlink.sh 2>&1 > /dev/null

Then tail -F $SYMLINK_PATH so that the tail hands the changing of the symbolic link or a rotation of the file.

This is slightly convoluted, but I don't know of another way to do this with tail. If anyone else knows of a utility that handles this, then let them step forward because I'd love to see it myself too - applications like Jetty by default do logs this way and I always script up a symlinking script run on a cron to compensate for it.

[Edit: Removed an erroneous 'j' from the end of one of the lines. You also had a bad variable name "lastModifiedFile" didn't exist, the proper name that you set is "lastModified"]