"Jan Sever" <n...@email.cz> writes: > On 02/19/2015 08:02 PM, Fernando Rodriguez wrote: >> On Tuesday, February 17, 2015 7:26:05 PM 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. >>> >>> >>> >> >> You can just pipe the output of strings /var/log/messages to less. You can > use >> strings(1) for systemd journal files also. > > Yeah and you can check whether it contains any binary data by > diff <(strings /var/log/messages) /var/log/messages
Well, yes; see it this way: I never used syslog-ng before. When I had to fix some problems, I wanted to read the log files. Less showed them in some hexl-mode, and it has never done anything like that before. I didn't even know that it has this hexl-mode. So I googled for how to read those log files because I figured that syslog-ng perhaps uses some stupid binary format and that there might be some program you're supposed to read them with. That didn't turn up anything and it really sucked. How am I supposed to know that there's a combination of a three-year-old bug and totally unexpected behaviour of less preventing me from reading these logs? Try something like 'less /boot/vmlinuz-3.17.8-gentoo-r1' and you don't get hexl-mode. Why such a surprise when trying to read a log file? -- Again we must be afraid of speaking of daemons for fear that daemons might swallow us. Finally, this fear has become reasonable.
