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benc
Asked: 2009-07-19 02:40:26 +0800 CST

Where is "/var/log/messages" on mac-osx?

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When you read the man pages on Mac OS X, there are references to /var/log/messages, but if you look for the file, it doesn't exist:

$ ls -l /var/log/messages
ls: /var/log/messages: No such file or directory
logging mac-osx

3 Answers

  1. It's /var/log/system.log on Mac OS X. You're probably reading man pages from Linux based software which uses the /var/log/messages file instead.

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  2. Best Answer

    If you refer to the man entry of syslog.conf, I guess the line is just an example:

    # Log anything (except mail) of level info or higher.
# Don't log private authentication messages!
*.info;mail.none;authpriv.none          /var/log/messages

    If you want to use that directory in your configuration, you'll have to create it.

    Edit: The actual syslog.conf on Mac OS X uses the system.log file.

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  3. The var directory on Mac OS X is symlinked, if you do an ls -l on your root directory you'll see this:

    lrwxr-xr-x@   1 root   admin        11 22 Feb  2008 var -> private/var

    So your var folder is located at:

    /private/var/

    However, I am unable to locate the messages folder or file within the log folder, so I can't help you with that part of the question.

    Edit: On further inspection, it looks as though the only thing in /var/log/messages on my RHEL server is sshd warning logs. Maybe the Mac OS X sshd binary logs to

    /private/var/log/sshd

    or similar.

    What messages are you looking for? You might want to try

    $ cat /var/log/[process name]

    and see if each process writes out its own message file.

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