Hi everyone, I'm trying my hand at shell scripting, and have successfully created a backup script that creates tar files of my web, mysql and VMWare data directories. I know, simple stuff...

So I then added the ability to verify the exit codes of each command, and print a status message based on Success or Fail using the echo command. Again, not rocket science, but this is useless considering I set this up in cron, and would never see those messages.

My question is this, I want to redirect, and append the success messages to a log file, however I'm not sure which log file. What is the best, or most-common practice for this type of activity? Do I create a new log file called Backups and just >> the status messages to it, or do I append to /var/log/messages or /var/log/syslog?

I'm guessing the difference is that you could easily tail a dedicated log file to see the last few instances, whereas I would have to cat /var/log/messages | grep "failed" to get any failures...?

Any opinions on this subject would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Jay

If you want to go the syslog route, check the "logger" program. You can specify the facility and log level in command line arguments, and let syslog handle where it should go (and configure syslog accordingly if needed).

A dedicated log file isn't a bad idea, but there are two instances that can get annoying: Remote logging (if you need that) also needs to be done manually (through e-mail or whatever). Maintaining the logs can get annoying also (trimming them of old entries, etc.). Syslog is already (in most distros) set up to handle these problems.

But, if you don't need to worry about these things, simply redirecting the output should do the trick.

If you really want, you can create your logs in the usual area eg /var/log and set a custom logrotate script to keep them under control. Just copy an existing logrotate script, should be some there already, and modify.

Thanks to you both for your answers!

I have tried out nuwen52's suggestion, of using logger to log success/failure messages directly to /var/log/syslog.

I then wrote a quick login script to show me any failure messages when I log in.

I've tested both manually, and today just shortly after noon will be the first cron run.

Thanks again!
Jay