Use Logger to Write Messages to Log Files

Feb 15, 2011, 17:34 (0 Talkback[s])
(Other stories by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier)

"Want a quick and easy way to write to system logs? Check out logger, a shell utility that works with syslog.

"The logger utility is part of the bsdutils package on Debian-based systems and the util-linux-ng package on Fedora (and presumably Red Hat Enterprise Linux, although I don't have a RHEL system handy to check). It should be installed by default.

"The most common use for logger is as a lightweight way to pass messages from a script to logfiles. Say you've got a backup script or another job that runs while you're home snoozing. Rather than having the script send an email and clog up your inbox, you can add logger to your script, and check periodically, at your leisure, to make sure things went as planned -- or use logger to just log error messages when the job doesn't run as planned or encounters an error."

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