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Datageek
Asked: 2012-02-16 15:42:38 +0800 CST

How to prefix logs with date and time

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How to prefix all logs with date time before they are written to the log file?

Let's say I am logging unexpected errors in crontab in the following way:

python somescript.py >> /tmp/output.log 2>&1

Is there an easy way to prefix (perhaps by piping through some third party command) all lines in the output.log with the date time so I would know when a given error happened?

time logging cron command-line-interface

1 Answers

  1. One way is to use logger (1) (usually /bin/logger), and simply send everything to syslog:

    python somescript.py | logger -t somescript.py

    Syslog will automatically prepend the time/date to the log entry for you, and write this information to /var/log/messages (or whatever is specified in /etc/syslog.conf).

    And this way, you have the advantage of all of the normal syslog/logrotation utilities.

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