Trying to monitor rclone from another process

I'm starting up rclone from within a Windows program. I'd like to monitor the progress of rclone while it's running. I figured I'd do this by looking at the log file that gets created. I do have this working but the problem is I keep re-reading most of the log lines, and the number of unnecessary lines keeps getting bigger and bigger as it continues (especially if I'm doing a DEBUG log).

Preferably I'd like rclone to write it's log to a pipe, then I just read from the other end of the pipe, getting only new log lines. Is there a way to set that up?

Or is there some other mechanism that I can use to have rclone give my program progress messages?

rclone has so called "remote control" interface. It is probably something your should experiment with here:

Then check out rc/core-stats.

Hi, @jmckay321 @kapitainsky

There is a very simple way to do this on Windows using a Powershell.

If you were using Linux you would use the tail command. This is similar it does effectively the same exact thing. Every time rclone adds to the log, you will see it in the powershell window.

Run rclone with the following flag

--log-file=c:/users/leo/rclonelog.txt

Open powershell 7 window and enter:

Get-Content -Wait c:\users\leo\rclonelog.txt

Let me know if you have any further questions.

Yes - "watching" log file from other process is easy indeed. But I assume it has some intended purpose beyond counting scrolled lines.

IMO it is very hard to get useful information from it. Good luck in coding some logic interpreting log file:) It is not machine friendly format (json etc.) and its content can change with every rclone version. Mission impossible I think.

I would definitely choose RC API to programmatically monitor rclone operation activity.