Checking log files

Logs directory

The common directory for logs is /var/log. Programs tend to save their logs in their own subdirectories under /var/log/. For example:

• Apache: /var/log/apache2
• MySQL: /var/log/mysql

Monitoring logs

Get n number of lines from the end of the file with tail -n

To check log files, tail is better than cat. cat will dump the whole log file to the console, good luck scrolling. tail -20 will print only the last 20 lines of the file.

Considering that you only really need to see the most recent changes in the logs, and that changes are usually at the end of the file, usingtail makes absolute sense.

1tail -20 foo.log # see last 20 lines of foo.log

Watch files with tail -f

tail -f will open the log file in the terminal, watch it, and update terminal output as changes are made. Consider this when you’re figuring out an internal server error 500 for Apache, you can watch the file and make your changes for faster troubleshooting.

1tail -f foo.log # watch foo.log for changes
2tail --follow foo.log # -f and --follow are the same thing

See errors by line numbers with cat -n

cat -n prints file contents with line numbers. If you know the line number for the error (let’s say 74), you can see it with cat -n | grep 74

1cat -n foo.log | grep 74 # will output whatever is on line 74 of foo.log