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
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3 Answers
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.
answered Jul 18, 2009 at 10:54
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3If you look at the actual /etc/syslog.conf instead of the man page, you see *.notice;authpriv,remoteauth,ftp,install.none;kern.debug;mail.crit /var/log/sy stem.log Jul 18, 2009 at 11:00
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Yes, as I said, the actual entry is system.log - NOT messages. It's in the Example section of man.– splattneJul 18, 2009 at 11:15
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splattne: that was it, my system works the way you described it, I just didn't know where to look for the config.– bencJul 18, 2009 at 15:10
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.
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I am reading the man pages that are pre-installed in Mac OS X. They must be from the base UNIX distribution (some kind of BSD...)– bencJul 18, 2009 at 15:08
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.
