The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

Finding stuff in "binary" files is no more difficult than text files. It depends on the particular format.

People tend to forget that text files ARE A BINARY FORMAT. You have your 7-bit ASCII message terminated by a new-line character.

You could also have an array of 4 byte little-endian unsigned integers, terminated by 4 bytes of zero. It would be just as easy to find the start of the next message as it is in text.

We're pretty spoiled these days and don't have to worry about our messages getting off by a bit or two. I recall modems where if you weren't using parity (or was it stop bits) you might lose sync and anything could happen.

Anyway, there might be valid complaints about the particular design of journald's binary format. But just because it is binary doesn't necessarily make it unusually hard to recover or read.