On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 2:29 PM, wrote: > > Alexander Kapshuk wrote: > > > On Tue, Feb 17, 2015 at 8:26 PM, lee wrote: > > > > > Hi, > > > > > > 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. > > > > > > > > > -- > > > Again we must be afraid of speaking of daemons for fear that daemons > > > might swallow us. Finally, this fear has become reasonable. > > > > > > > > If you're talking about /var/log/messages, which is: > > messages: data > > > > I use cat(1). > > I wonder if the OP is using systemd and trying to read the journal > files? Those live under /var/lib/journal (which you need to create; Gentoo doesn't do it by default last time I saw), in the directory named after the machine ID (cat /etc/machine-id). And there are several journal files, of the kind: system@1df50cd49c7f4a089c9414561f65aac7-000000000006f091-000507235df68768.journal I think it would be really difficult to mix up that with /var/log/messages. I think it's just that some part of /var/log/messages got corrupted (happens a lot of times), and therefore /usr/bin/less identifies it as a binary files since it contains non-printable characters. Regards. -- Canek Peláez Valdés Profesor de asignatura, Facultad de Ciencias Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México