Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook - Third Edition

Getting ready

Log files help you deduce what is going wrong with a system. It is a good practice to log progress and actions with log file messages. The logger command will place data into log files with syslogd.

These are some of the standard Linux log files. Some distributions use different names for these files:

Log file	Description
/var/log/boot.log	Boot log information
/var/log/httpd	Apache web server log
/var/log/messages	Post boot kernel information
/var/log/auth.log /var/log/secure	User authentication log
/var/log/dmesg	System boot up messages
/var/log/mail.log /var/log/maillog	Mail server log
/var/log/Xorg.0.log	X server log