Re: Showing /dev/tty12 (or similar) syslog output in screen window

[Eric D. Hendrickson]

"Nikolai Weibull" <address@hidden> writes:

> On 6/20/06, Folkert van Heusden <address@hidden> wrote:
>> ... which is handy in screen while screen doesn't
>> let you scrollback
>
> After I did a ':scrollback 0', or what?
>
>> > the problem is that /var/log/messages is 0600 and owned by root:root
>> > (and I don't want to change that).
>
>> sudo is your friend!
>
> I don't want to go through sudo just to read system messages.  (Of
> course, how much sensitive data can one really find in
> /var/log/messages, so perhaps I can just set it to 0640?)

Why not?  What do you mean by "going through sudo"?  Sudo really is
your friend in a secure environment.

Just do "sudo tail -f /var/log/messages" and type in your password.

(or fix sudoers so it doesn't ask for a password - I add myself to
group "wheel" and set up group wheel in sudoers that way..)

> It often seems that whenever I post a question to a mailing list,
> people are more than eager to solve a different problem than the one I
> am interested in.  I wonder why that is...

I think this is the same problem - the question is, what are the
possible solutions to that problem...

> Anyway, let's assume then that I don't write my messages to
> /var/log/messages and only write them to /dev/tty12 (or a similar
> device).  Now, how do I display the output sent to terminal /dev/tty12
> (or similar) in a window in screen?

tail -f /dev/tty12

or sudo tail -f /dev/tty12

or sudo multitail /dev/tty12

(never heard of multitail before, love it!  that will allow me to cut
down the number of log monitoring windows...  I monitor with swatch
and tail on system logs and apache logs...)

Best regards,
Eric