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Accepted
ddinchev
Asked: 2012-06-21 02:17:41 +0800 CST

How to log to /var/log/messages on Debian Squeeze as normal user?

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In Ubuntu I could do something like:

sudo echo something | logger -t logstuff

Then I would get well formatted message in syslog (/var/log/messages). On Debian Squeeze that isn't the case, the above command would not log there.

It would also be nice if I could log as normal user there...

Any ideas are welcome.

debian syslog

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    It does exactly as you describe on my Debian Squeeze system.

    root@neo:~# echo something | logger -t logstuff
root@neo:~# cd /var/log
root@neo:/var/log# tail -f messages
Jun 20 07:12:53 neo kernel: 1264 pages in swap cache
Jun 20 07:12:53 neo kernel: Swap cache stats: add 246940, delete 245676, find 95246080/95251764
Jun 20 07:12:53 neo kernel: Free swap  = 254264kB
Jun 20 07:12:53 neo kernel: Total swap = 262140kB
Jun 20 07:12:53 neo kernel: 131071 pages RAM
Jun 20 07:12:53 neo kernel: 0 pages HighMem
Jun 20 07:12:53 neo kernel: 2707 pages reserved
Jun 20 07:12:53 neo kernel: 35457 pages shared
Jun 20 07:12:53 neo kernel: 77069 pages non-shared
Jun 20 10:22:26 neo logstuff: something

root@neo:/var/log# cat /etc/debian_version
6.0.5

    This is a default config, and logger is provided by one of the low level Debian packages, so there's a good chance it's installed (bsdutils). If it doesn't work on your system, it's possible / likely that the syslog configuration (rsyslog, whatever you have installed) is sending the alerts to a different file.

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