Mac OS X: where is “/var/log/messages”?

Question

When you read the man pages on Mac OS X, there are references to /var/log/messages, but if you look for the file, it doesn't exist:

$ ls -l /var/log/messages
ls: /var/log/messages: No such file or directory

Answer 1

If you refer to the man entry of syslog.conf, I guess the line is just an example:

# Log anything (except mail) of level info or higher.
# Don't log private authentication messages!
*.info;mail.none;authpriv.none          /var/log/messages

If you want to use that directory in your configuration, you'll have to create it.

Edit: The actual syslog.conf on Mac OS X uses the system.log file.

Answer 2

It's /var/log/system.log on Mac OS X. You're probably reading man pages from Linux based software which uses the /var/log/messages file instead.

Answer 3

The var directory on Mac OS X is symlinked, if you do an ls -l on your root directory you'll see this:

lrwxr-xr-x@   1 root   admin        11 22 Feb  2008 var -> private/var

So your var folder is located at:

/private/var/

However, I am unable to locate the messages folder or file within the log folder, so I can't help you with that part of the question.

Edit: On further inspection, it looks as though the only thing in /var/log/messages on my RHEL server is sshd warning logs. Maybe the Mac OS X sshd binary logs to

/private/var/log/sshd

or similar.

What messages are you looking for? You might want to try

$ cat /var/log/[process name]

and see if each process writes out its own message file.