Re: Syslog and pg_options (for RPMs)

On Thu, Feb 08, 2001 at 05:50:55PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> ncm(at)zembu(dot)com (Nathan Myers) writes:
> > Not so fast... logger just writes its arguments to syslog. I don't
> > see any indication that it (portably) reads its standard input.
>
> FWIW, the HPUX 10.20 man page for logger sez:
>
> A message can be given on the command line, which is logged
> immediately, or a file is read and each line is logged. If no
> file or message is specified, the contents of the standard input
> are logged.

Right, I missed where the Linux man page says:

logger [-is] [-f file] [-p pri] [-t tag] [-u socket] [message ...]
...
_message_ Write the message to log; if not specified, and the
-f flag is not provided, standard input is logged.

So now the question is, why did they write splogger? splogger parses
the beginning of each message to assign a severity; if it finds "alert:"
or "warning:" it assigns those, or "info" otherwise. To make splogger
useful you have to know it's listening.

> and they also claim
>
> STANDARDS CONFORMANCE
> logger: XPG4, POSIX.2
>
> The fact that it's POSIX.2 rather than POSIX.1 might worry folks, but
> I suspect the majority of systems will have it if they have syslog.
>
> (Curiously, the HP man pages do not say that syslog(3) or syslogd(1m)
> conform to *any* standard ... hmm ... is logger more portable than
> syslog?)

The Linux page says just:

HISTORY
A syslog function call appeared in BSD 4.2.

Normally if there's a standard they mention it.

Nathan Myers
ncm(at)zembu(dot)com