Missing Console log

[reading.man]

Hi there,

I opened Console on my iBook G4 (Mac OSX 10.4.11) today, to check the System log. However, I discovered the records in the system log only went as far back as the time I most recently logged onto the computer, i.e., this afternoon. This was my first time using Console in several weeks, so I know I did not delete the system log. Incidentally, after discovering this, I shut down the computer and restarted it, and the log files from my previous log-in were still there. The computer is not shared, but for my own personal use.

Any suggestions on why this might have happened? And any suggestions on how to recover the system log files?

Thank you for your time, it is appreciated.

 

[smirk]

Log files are periodically rotated and deleted, maybe that explains it.

Look in directory /var/log. You should see a system.log, followed by files with names like system.log.0.bz2, system.log.1.bz2, etc. The .bz2 files are older logs that have been compressed and set aside. As time moves forward, the oldest logs are deleted and newer ones rotate in to take their place.

If you don't see any .bz2 files, so that the only file is system.log, then perhaps you somehow have your system configured to only maintain one system log, or perhaps you have a utility that's cleaning these log files up.

 

[reading.man]

Smirk,

I accessed /var/log and then checked system.log. You were right, much of the older history was filed there, albeit as gz files. (I couldn't see any bz2 files -- I am guessing they apply to different or newer Mac models.) The files were listed sequentially, for example, system.log.1.gz, system.log.2.gz, etc.

Thank you for sharing your knowledge, it has been extremely helpful. Thanks, too, for taking the time to reply to my message, I appreciate it.

RM

 

[smirk]

You're right, it looks like OS X 10.6 uses bzip2 compression, and older versions use gzip compression. Glad I could help.