Re: [gentoo-user] syslog-ng: how to read the log files

[Peter Humphrey <peter@prh.myzen.co.uk>]

On Tuesday 17 February 2015 22:51:55 Peter Humphrey wrote:
> On Tuesday 17 February 2015 20:41:06 Matti Nykyri wrote:
> > > On Feb 17, 2015, at 20:26, lee <lee@yagibdah.de> wrote:
> > > how do you read the log files when using syslog-ng?
> > > The log file seem to be some sort of binary that doesn't display
> > > too
> > > well in less, and there doesn't seem to be any way to read them.
> > 
> > This was discussed earlier on this list... Actually what syslog-ng
> > produces is plain text. There seemed to be a bug that creates some
> > binary (i.e. unreadable characters) and that causes less to consider
> > files to be binary and show them incorrectly.
> 
> Yes, that was me. I found that something had marked /var/log/messages
> as a binary file. There's nothing in it that can't be read, no
> mysterious characters or anything; it's just marked as binary. All
> you have to do is to move it, then cat it back into place. I did that
> with no ill effects.

Actually, this is what I did, as I reported here on 26/12:
 
> 1.    Boot rescue system and mount main system
> 2.    # cd /mnt/main/var/log
> 3.    # mv messages messages.bin
> 4.    # strings messages.bin > messages
> 5.    # rm messages.bin
> 6.    Reboot.

-- 
Rgds
Peter.