Hello, Lee. On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 07:26:05PM +0100, lee wrote: > Hi,
> how do you read the log files when using syslog-ng? > The log file seem to be some sort of binary that doesn't display too > well in less, and there doesn't seem to be any way to read them. When I try "less /var/log/messages", less gives me what is basically a hex dump of the file. I'm assuming you see the same. less searches part of the buffer (presumably the first few KB) and if it finds non-printable characters, uses an input filter first to convert to the hex dump. This same filter is what enables less to expand compressed files and man pages. What I do is to disable this input filter with # LESSOPEN="" less /var/log/messages . It is evident that every now and then, syslog-ng writes a stream of several hundred null bytes to /var/log/messages. It seems to do this when logging the system startup messages. This is probably a bug. By the way, the LESSOPEN="" trick can sometimes leave your display corrupted, displaying wierd glyphs on the screen when you type. To restore your screen, output ^o. To do this, type (blindly) # echo <ctrl-v><crtl-o><CR> . > -- > Again we must be afraid of speaking of daemons for fear that daemons > might swallow us. Finally, this fear has become reasonable. -- Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).