We said "query the journal". This is true but also very generic. Let's say
"print log entries from the journal" instead, so that users who are looking for
"logging" are more likely to figure out that the journalctl is the tool for
them.
Also, mention systemd-journal-remote.service which can write the journal too.
And give some hints how to figure out how to write *to* the journal.
--convert writes the journal files read by journalctl to the given
location. The location should be specified as a full journal file
path (e.g. /a/b/c/converted.journal). The directory specifies where
the converted journal files will be stored. The filename specifies
the naming convention the converted journal files will follow.
So far the --help text and the man page of journactl were mostly a large
pile of options shown next to each other. Let's add some basic
structure, and group switches by sections such as "Filtering Options",
"Output Options" and so on.
Do this the same way in the --help text and in the man page.
Since this moves everything around anyway, I also opted to rebreak all
paragraphs in the man page. This makes the patch larger than necessary,
but given that this whole patch doesn't really change contents besides
section titles I figured this would be OK.
This comes up occasionally with new users. The phrase "Logs begin ..." is
ambiguous because it can be taken to mean the logs being displayed or all logs
(the intended meaning). Let's rephrase this as "Journal begins ..." to make
this clearer.
journalctl --unit= already did this, and allows you to tail all the logs
for a certain slice easily. It seemed only natural to make --user-unit
behave in a similar way.
The _SYSTEMD_USER_SLICE field was not documented as being added by
journald, so I have added that to the documentation too.
Furthermore, I have documented the existing behaviour of --unit= and the
new behaviour of --user-unit=
The behaviour was actually not documented before, so I am also OK with
removing the match for the --unit= command instead. The user would then
have to manually provide _SYSTEMD_SLICE= filter to journalctl in both
cases. Both options work for me.
The "include" files had type "book" for some raeason. I don't think this
is meaningful. Let's just use the same everywhere.
$ perl -i -0pe 's^..DOCTYPE (book|refentry) PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.[25]//EN"\s+"http^<!DOCTYPE refentry PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.5//EN"\n "http^gms' man/*.xml
No need to waste space, and uniformity is good.
$ perl -i -0pe 's|\n+<!--\s*SPDX-License-Identifier: LGPL-2.1..\s*-->|\n<!-- SPDX-License-Identifier: LGPL-2.1+ -->|gms' man/*.xml
The option cursor-file takes a filename as argument. If the file exists and
contains a valid cursor, this is used to start the output after this position.
At the end, the last cursor gets written to the file.
This allows for an easy implementation of a timer that regularly looks in the
journal for some messages.
journalctl --cursor-file err-cursor -b -p err
journalctl --cursor-file audit-cursor -t audit --grep DENIED
Or you might want to walk the journal in steps of 10 messages:
journalctl --cursor-file ./curs -n10 --since=today -t systemd
In the default journalctl output, unprintable entries are abbreviated as
“[<amount> blob data]”; using the same term in the documentation helps
users to quickly discover the option they need to add in order to see
those entries.
Also, while we are at it, beef it up, by adding json-seq support (i.e.
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7464). This is particularly useful in
conjunction with jq's --seq switch.
Let's remove redundancy and not advertise "journalctl --new-id128"
anymore, now that we have "systemd-id128 new" in a proper tool.
This allows us to reduce the overly large journalctl command set a bit.
Note that this just removes the --help and man text, the call remains
available for compat reasons.
Docbook styles required those to be present, even though the templates that we
use did not show those names anywhere. But something changed semi-recently (I
would suspect docbook templates, but there was only a minor version bump in
recent years, and the changelog does not suggest anything related), and builds
now work without those entries. Let's drop this dead weight.
Tested with F26-F29, debian unstable.
$ perl -i -0pe 's/\s*<authorgroup>.*<.authorgroup>//gms' man/*xml
These lines are generally out-of-date, incomplete and unnecessary. With
SPDX and git repository much more accurate and fine grained information
about licensing and authorship is available, hence let's drop the
per-file copyright notice. Of course, removing copyright lines of others
is problematic, hence this commit only removes my own lines and leaves
all others untouched. It might be nicer if sooner or later those could
go away too, making git the only and accurate source of authorship
information.
This part of the copyright blurb stems from the GPL use recommendations:
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.en.html
The concept appears to originate in times where version control was per
file, instead of per tree, and was a way to glue the files together.
Ultimately, we nowadays don't live in that world anymore, and this
information is entirely useless anyway, as people are very welcome to
copy these files into any projects they like, and they shouldn't have to
change bits that are part of our copyright header for that.
hence, let's just get rid of this old cruft, and shorten our codebase a
bit.
When dealing with a large number of template instances, for example
when launching daemons per VRF, it is hard for operators to correlate
log lines to arguments.
Add a new with-unit mode which, if available, prefixes unit and user
unit names when displaying its log messages instead of the syslog
identifier. It will also use the full timestamp with timezones, like
the short-full mode.
Files which are installed as-is (any .service and other unit files, .conf
files, .policy files, etc), are left as is. My assumption is that SPDX
identifiers are not yet that well known, so it's better to retain the
extended header to avoid any doubt.
I also kept any copyright lines. We can probably remove them, but it'd nice to
obtain explicit acks from all involved authors before doing that.
Fixes#5387.
I kept the _SYSTEMD_UNIT= example because it is easy to understand and
not very verbose. _SYSTEMD_CGROUP has much longer entries which do not
fit well in the narrow man page. Instead, I added an explanation of what
-u is translated into.
Case sensitive or case insensitive matching can be requested using
--case-sensitive[=yes|no].
Unless specified, matching is case sensitive if the pattern contains any
uppercase letters, and case insensitive otherwise. This matches what
forward-search does in emacs, and recently also --ignore-case in less. This
works surprisingly well, because usually when one is wants to do case-sensitive
matching, the pattern is usually camel-cased. In the less frequent case when
case-sensitive matching is required with an all-lowercase pattern,
--case-sensitive can be used to override the automatic logic.
This option allows restricting the shown fields in the output modes that
would normally show all fields. It allows clients that are only
interested in a subset of the fields to access those more efficiently.
Also, it makes the resulting size of the output more predictable.
It has no effect on the various `short` output modes, because those
already only show a subset of the fields.
