Just so you're aware, due to the way Python's file handler works, an open file which is rotated will break your follow loop. I had this problem in an application I wrote recently. As far as I know, there's no simple fix for it. In fact I had to do some nasty hacking which involved triggering a SIGHUP and catching it in the application then handling the reloading of the file. If you're curious check out logmon: https://github.com/maxcountryman/logmon (see the bottom of the README).