Linux Administration Cookbook

How to do it...

As mentioned earlier, journald utilizes a binary logging format, meaning it can't be opened with traditional text parsers and editors. Instead, we use the journalctl command to read logs.

Simply running the following opens your log:

$ sudo journalctl

The output for the preceding command is shown here:

This is familiar to anyone who's looked as a regular old syslog file; note that the format is the same by default.

It is quite noisy though, and on a busy system we might not want to see everything historic.

Maybe we want to just watch the log as it's written? If this is true, we can follow it with -f:

$ sudo journalctl -f