Logging with syslog

Usually, logfiles related to different daemons and applications are located in the /var/log directory, as it is the common directory for storing log files. If you read through a few lines of the logfiles, you can see that lines in the log are in a common format. In Linux, creating and writing log information to logfiles at /var/log are handled by a protocol called syslog , handled by the syslogd daemon. Every standard application makes use of syslog for logging information. In this recipe, we will discuss how to make use of syslogd for logging information from a shell script.

Getting ready

Logfiles are very good for helping you deduce what is going wrong with a system. Hence, while writing critical applications, it is always a good practice to log the progress of an application with messages into a logfile. We will learn the command logger to log into log files with syslogd. Before getting to know how to write into logfiles, let's go through a list of important logfiles...