Alan Mackenzie <a...@muc.de> writes: > 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.
Yes, that's what I was looking at. > 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. Is that a new feature of less? I've never had this problem with any other file. IIRC, unprintable characters, like null, used to be displayed like ^@, and less always did a great job in preventing the display from needing a reset without switching to an equivalent of hexl-mode. BTW, what happens when something writes to /var/log/messages? I noticed today that the default shorewall.conf that ships with gentoo has that set as logfile for shorewall. Shouldn't all messages going into /var/log/messages go to syslog-ng instead when syslog-ng is used, with nothing else writing to this file? -- Again we must be afraid of speaking of daemons for fear that daemons might swallow us. Finally, this fear has become reasonable.
