Hi,

i am looking for a systematic and unified approach for managing log messages from c programs running on linux. This may take a syslog like approach. Are there any syslog libraries for c and any sample codes to use them ? I came across one in python http://docs.python.org/library/logging.html. But not sure if a wrapper is available for this library to be called from within a c program.

Any clues and directions will be highly appreciated!

The wrapper is in python. No wrapper in C; the basic function is a C-callable function, and the python wrapper converts the python call to a C call.

man syslog
man 3 syslog

if you don't want to do the syslogd approach you can dup2 a file descripter to stderr.

Thanks for the help. I decided to first look at syslog library and found that i can actually do a syslog() in my c program. So, i picked up a quick example as:

#include <syslog.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)
{


printf("writing log\n");
openlog ("testProg", LOG_CONS | LOG_PID | LOG_NDELAY, LOG_LOCAL1);

syslog (LOG_MAKEPRI(LOG_LOCAL1, LOG_NOTICE), "Program started by User %d", getuid ());
syslog (LOG_INFO, "A tree falls in a forest");

closelog ();
return 0;
}

My intention here was to send all log messages going out of this program to a separate log file in /var/log/testProg.log. However, what i found was that all messages were going to /var/log/messages and /var/log/syslog. I figured out that i have to specify the destination for logs coming out of LOC_LOCAL1 facility in the /etc/syslog.conf. So, i did a little modification in the syslog and added the line:

local1.* -/var/log/testProg.log

But still no success and the messages still go to /var/log/messages and /var/log/syslog.

Any clues on where i am making the mistake.

Re the python wrapper, did u mean that there does exist a wrapper in python for c? Any links?

Thanks in advance!

The python provided thing is actually a wrapper...it is not the bare one. On *nix OS, the bare logging mechanism is provided by a library which is written in C. So, jiml8 mean to say that, when you are programming in python, you are really using a wrapper, but when you are programming in C, don't look for a wrapper, directly use the bare one provided by native library as you have done in your example...


If you want to send your log to a different file, it should be simple as you write to any other file,
1. write a function that uses fprintf to write to your own log file.
2. write a macro for that function.
3. use that macro wherever you want to have a log.

Hope this make clear.

Srinivas

did you restart the syslog daemon?

Have you looked at Log4c? http://log4c.sourceforge.net/

yes,i did and even restarted my machine :-(

Thanks Srinivas for making the point clear. I could take the second approach u mentioned but with that i would have to do all by myself, in a way reinvent the logging whereas it is already pretty cool in python and c with standard logging, network logging and rotation functionalities.

cross platform:

ok guys, i found a way around. Spent the whole day with figuring out why the logs from syslog() function in c are not going to their separate files, i gave up!

So, the solution i discovered and that works for me is to use the Python logging and call python from C. A simple example is:

#include <Python.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)
{

printf("trying to call python for logging\n");

Py_Initialize();
PyRun_SimpleString("x = 78");
PyRun_SimpleString("print x");
PyRun_SimpleString("import logging");
PyRun_SimpleString("logger = logging.getLogger('myapp')");
PyRun_SimpleString("hdlr = logging.FileHandler('/usr/local/logging/myapp.log')");
PyRun_SimpleString("formatter = logging.Formatter('%(asctime)s %(levelname)s %(message)s')");
PyRun_SimpleString("hdlr.setFormatter(formatter)");
PyRun_SimpleString("logger.addHandler(hdlr)");
PyRun_SimpleString("logger.setLevel(logging.INFO)");
PyRun_SimpleString("logger.error('and another log message with x value: %d',x)");
Py_Finalize();

return 0;
}

This sends log messages coming out of this program to myapp.log in a standard way.

I am planning to create a simple header file that will take care of initializing python etc., and provides functions that take log-file, log-level and log-message as arguments and take care of logging with rotation etc.

Thanks all for your help.

yes i had a quick glance. But didnt seem to be as rich as the python's logging.