Help moving messages out of console

[cbalu]

Hi all,

I need to know a way of moving all the messages which gets on the console to some file. Basically i want to configure syslog to log the messages to some file instead of printing them on the console.

Thanks in advance...

-BalaC-

[egan]

Ah, the beauty of redirection. This a very powerful aspect of Unix.

From what I can tell, you are running syslog to get logs across a network, and you would like them to be saved to a file rather than displayed on the console.

The regular redirection command is: >
syslog > file.txt
would send the standard output to file.txt. It will clobber it though, so if you want to append, use >>
syslog >> file.txt

If you would like to save it to a file AND display it on the console use tee.
syslog | tee file.txt
If there is a lot of text, you will probably want:
syslog | tee file.txt | less

[cbalu]

Egan thanks for your reply.

But this is not what i want.

I want the messages which is getting printed in the console to be moved to a file. I know about the redirection and tee command which will help me to move the logged messages onto some file. Whereas my requirement is that, i should able to log the prints onto a file in real time.

-BalaC-

[lomcevak]

Console messages should already be in /var/log/messages.

man syslog.conf on how to configure the syslog daemon via /etc/syslog.conf.

[cbalu]

Lomcevak thanks for your reply.

man syslog.conf didn't worked in my FC8 machine. Can you point me to some other material for details about how to edit syslog.conf file

-BalaC-

[egan]

Egan thanks for your reply.

But this is not what i want.

I want the messages which is getting printed in the console to be moved to a file. I know about the redirection and tee command which will help me to move the logged messages onto some file. Whereas my requirement is that, i should able to log the prints onto a file in real time.

-BalaC-

I'm sorry, I don't really understand what you want then...

[drl]

Hi.

On my Debian lenny system, console messages are also recorded in /var/log/syslog. There is also a /var/log/messages, but that contains nothing but lines with "MARK ..." (i.e. time markers) in it.

I don't have a Fedora 8 system available, but I do have Fedora 10. In that system, the file /var/log/messages and /var/log/kdm.log -- the latter for kernel messages, and the former contains a lot more information compared to the Debian system, and there are many other file in /var/log as well. The relevant configuration file in Fedora 10 appears to be rsyslog.conf. My guess is that the default situation is that console messages are also copied to /var/log/messages, /var/log/kdm.log, etc. So you could look over such files to see if they satisfied your requirement.

Otherwise you may need to modify the logging rules in rsyslog.conf, and / or wait for someone else to stop by to give more advice.

In general, I don't see this as a programming / scripting problem as much as it is a Fedora configuration problem. If you agree, perhaps a RedHat / Fedora forum would be a better area in which to place your question. There is one here at Linux Forums, for example: Redhat / Fedora Linux Help - Linux Forums

Below are some supporting data for my conclusions. Best wishes ... cheers, drl

System characteristics:

OS, ker|rel, machine: Linux, 2.6.27.19-170.2.35.fc10.i686, i686
Distribution        : Fedora release 10 (Cambridge)
===
From top of file:
-rw------- 1 root root 10370 2009-03-21 03:43 /var/log/messages

Mar 15 04:52:57 localhost kernel: imklog 3.21.10, log source =
/proc/kmsg started.

Mar 15 04:52:57 localhost rsyslogd: [origin software="rsyslogd"
swVersion="3.21.10" x-pid="1337" x-info="http://www.rsyslog.com"] restart
===
Possibly relevant man page:

RSYSLOG.CONF(5)           Linux System Administration          RSYSLOG.CONF(5)

NAME
       rsyslog.conf - rsyslogd(8) configuration file

DESCRIPTION
       The  rsyslog.conf  file  is  the  main configuration file for the rsys-
       logd(8) which logs system messages on *nix systems.  This  file  speci-
       fies  rules for logging.

-- excerpt from man rsyslog.conf
===