Command line utilities to work with UNIX syslog.

syslog-unix

Read syslog messages from a UNIX domain datagram socket and format it to standard output.

Features:

• Produce human friendly log messages from syslog.
• Produce syslog messages suitable for forwarding to remote log server.
• Strip new line character from the end of the message.
• Replace new line character with #012 (configurable) to preserve message boundaries when using syslog output format.
• Optionally use RFC3339 (with microseconds) timestamp format with syslog output format.
• Configurable maximum message length.
• Optionally to read message timestamps prefixed to syslog datagram (see socktee -T flag).

Example usage

Read messages from syslog socket and print them in human readable form:

umask 0000
syslog-unix /dev/log human

Prints messages like this:

user.notice: 2022-04-22 15:10:26.566281 someuser: hello world

Read messages from syslog socket and print them in syslog format suitable for forwarding to syslog server:

umask 0000
syslog-unix /dev/log syslog

Prints messages like this:

<13>Apr 22 15:58:03 somehost someuser: hello world

syslog-logger

Read log message from standard input and format it as syslog message to a UNIX domain socket.

Example usage

Log a single message:

syslog-logger $USER "hello world"

Log every line of standard input as a separate message:

ls | syslog-logger ls

Log standard input as a single message:

fortune | syslog-logger -1 fortune

syslog-mlogger

Read log message from standard input and format it as syslog message to a UNIX domain socket, while reconstructing log messages spanning multiple lines as one message.

Example usage

syslog-mlogger java-app '^\s+' --negate --strip-pattern <<EOF
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException
        at com.example.myproject.Book.getTitle(Book.java:16)
        at com.example.myproject.Author.getBookTitles(Author.java:25)
        at com.example.myproject.Bootstrap.main(Bootstrap.java:14)
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException
        at com.example.myproject.Book.getTitle(Book.java:16)
        at com.example.myproject.Author.getBookTitles(Author.java:25)
        at com.example.myproject.Bootstrap.main(Bootstrap.java:14)
Hello world!
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException
        at com.example.myproject.Book.getTitle(Book.java:16)
        at com.example.myproject.Author.getBookTitles(Author.java:25)
        at com.example.myproject.Bootstrap.main(Bootstrap.java:14)
EOF

The example command will log 4 syslog messages:

<13>Apr 22 15:02:30 java-app: Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException
at com.example.myproject.Book.getTitle(Book.java:16)
at com.example.myproject.Author.getBookTitles(Author.java:25)
at com.example.myproject.Bootstrap.main(Bootstrap.java:14)

<13>Apr 22 15:02:30 java-app: Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException
at com.example.myproject.Book.getTitle(Book.java:16)
at com.example.myproject.Author.getBookTitles(Author.java:25)
at com.example.myproject.Bootstrap.main(Bootstrap.java:14)

<13>Apr 22 15:02:30 java-app: Hello world!

<13>Apr 22 15:02:30 java-app: Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException
at com.example.myproject.Book.getTitle(Book.java:16)
at com.example.myproject.Author.getBookTitles(Author.java:25)
at com.example.myproject.Bootstrap.main(Bootstrap.java:14)

Installation

Install cargo utility with your package manager.

After installation with cargo utility the binaries will be located in ~/.cargo/bin.

From crates.io

cargo install syslogio

From source

Clone the source code repository with Git.

In the source directory run:

cargo install --path . --force