replacing rsyslogd in minimal with journald [was Re: systemd requires HTTP server and serves QR codes]

[Bryn M. Reeves]

On 10/09/2012 03:19 PM, Tom Hughes wrote:
> While "less" helpfully wraps your log lines at the edge of your terminal 
> journalctl unhelpfully truncates them or, if -a is used, makes you use 
> left/right cursor to scroll back and forth in an attempt to read the 
> lines. Especially since it fully qualifies the host name so the actual 
> message has barely got started by column 80.

Agreed: I find this irritating too (and the default SYSTEMD_PAGER _is_
less so I'm not sure how it's being run).

Setting PIPE or piping to a pager is even worse - the lines are
truncated at 77 chars regardless of the term width so for now I'm
running journalctl --no-pager -a | less to get wrapped lines in a pager.

> More importantly though, what is the equivalent of "fgrep xxx 
> /var/log/messages" which is certainly pretty much the most common thing 
> I do on my logs... I can't see any sort of searching in journalctl?

journalctl | fgrep?

This one is pretty fine by me tbh.

> The next most common thing I probably do is to load the log into vi so I 
> can search back and forth to see matches in context, but obviously that 
> is not something journalctl is every really going to be able to do.

Your favourite pager probably can though. Less has the same mark and
navigation keystrokes as vi. Although if you really do want to open in
an editor you'll probably need to redirect to a file.

Regards,
Bryn.