Evaluate systemd logs using Journalctl
Including Kernel Messages
If your want to check for kernel messages, you can do so for the current session with journalctl -k
. For information on previous sessions, use journalctl -k -b -n
.
The option -p determines the priority of displayed messages. For instance, journalctl -p err
shows error messages whereas journalctl -p crit
displays critical messages. The log levels are the usual syslog log levels as documented in syslog(3) which you can find online, for instance on Wikipedia [4]. Both numeric and text values are accepted.
Analysis Options
Before we had systemd, if your system didn't recognise an external drive such as a USB stick, your only choice was to examine the output of dmesg
using the command tail -n 10
. This would show the last ten lines of output, hopefully displaying when the stick was connected. Journalctl has a built-in function for this. Use journalctl -n <value>
to display the last x number of lines.
System admins also used to use the command tail -f
to keep track of log files. On operating systems using systemd, you can now achieve the same thing by running journalctl -f
. By way of example, run the command journalctl -u apache2 -f
. Use Ctrl+C to interrupt the continuous output.
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