“Take command of your log files by learning to handle those
pesky logging daemons.”
“Most UNIX-like systems since the early days of BSD (and Linux
certainly falls in this category) have provided an API for
application programs to send log messages to the system, where they
can be centrally handled at the discretion of the system operator.
Prior to the creation of this facility, each application program
would handle log messages in its own way. Some would write to
STDERR, some would write to a file, some would write to a pipe, and
some would offer all these options or more.”
“As the number and complexity of applications on a system grows,
so too does the complexity of the system administrator’s job.
Applications and their messages vary widely in their significance
to certain audiences. If a number of applications are considered
“critical” and their status is the system administrator’s
responsibility, he does not want to search to find out where and
how every critical application logs its status. That’s where
syslogd comes in.”