Hi,
I was just trying to get tail to work in a terminal I was going to use for monitoring things that happen on the system when I noticed that the output of the command "dmesg" and catting /var/log/dmesg are different. Why is this? Is there something wrong with my system... like my system logger not working properly, or is it suppost to be like this? I can figure out how to make it do what I want it to do even if they are different, it just struck me as strange. The command dmesg updates (eg, when I put in and pull out a USB flash drive it will report it), however /var/log/dmesg doesn't seem to change at all, it's stuck right after something to do with my wireless card. Just wondered if this was normal or something screwy.

Marshall

dmesg (as in the command) is a "window" into the kernels ring-buffer.

The file /var/log/dmesg is only created in certain distros, and to
the best of my knowledge reflects the system messages up to when the
box goes multi-user (but I may have that all wrong since Slack doesn't
have that file in the first place). :}


Cheers,
Tink

Normal.
Pat creates/overwrites the /var/log/dmesg in /etc/rc.d/rc.M script just BEFORE starting the logger. So the dmesg file is a snapshot of everything that happened before the logger takes over recording what is currently happening.

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