The Journal - a proposed syslog replacement [LWN.net]

The Journal - a proposed syslog replacement

Posted Nov 21, 2011 23:56 UTC (Mon) by kmself (subscriber, #11565)
In reply to: The Journal - a proposed syslog replacement by drag
Parent article: The Journal - a proposed syslog replacement

I believe the point is that you can access / search / manage / view compressed files with readily available shell tools.

zgrep will search them.
zcat or zless will dump them to stdout.

lesspipe + less will allow you to view them with less, as you would any other file (lesspipe will also render numerous other file formats as straight text, which is particularly useful).

Woe unto you if you're on a system without these tools, but that's another story. Writing your own shell wrappers (scripts/functions) is trivial.

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The Journal - a proposed syslog replacement

Posted Nov 22, 2011 0:55 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I was more pointing out that tools exist that do the gunzip -c internally. I almost never use gunzip except via the z* tools and tar xf. I always appreciate shotcuts for things like that (at least those commonly available on random machines, e.g. my vim bindings don't modify core behavior that is easy to get a bad habit with when sshing around, like nnoremap jj <Esc>).