Hi! I just configured my Solaris 10 machine to use logadm with compression for logs.

Here is an example of rotation for the message_log.

/opt/pmx/var/log/message_log -C 90 -P 'Sun Mar 25 03:59:00 2007' -p now -z 0

My issue is now that they are rotating I cannot cat them with zcat. Here is the following error that I get it does not see the compressed logs.

[root@localhost /opt/pmx/var/log]# ls
blocklist_log manager pmx_err.1.gz pmx_out ppm_log.2.gz resources_log.0.gz
blocklist_log.0.gz message_log pmx_err.2.gz pmx_out.0.gz ppm_log.3.gz resources_log.1.gz
blocklist_log.1.gz message_log.0.gz pmx_err.3.gz pmx_out.1.gz proserv_failover_log resources_log.2.gz
blocklist_log.2.gz message_log.1.gz pmx_log pmx_out.2.gz proserv_failover_log.0.gz resources_log.3.gz
blocklist_log.3.gz message_log.2.gz pmx_log.0.gz pmx_out.3.gz proserv_failover_log.1.gz rpc
csl_log message_log.3.gz pmx_log.1.gz ppm_log proserv_failover_log.2.gz snapshot_log
csl_pending_alerts pmx_err pmx_log.2.gz ppm_log.0.gz proserv_failover_log.3.gz
install_log pmx_err.0.gz pmx_log.3.gz ppm_log.1.gz resources_log
[root@localhost /opt/pmx/var/log]# zcat message_log.3.gz
message_log.3.gz.Z: No such file or directory
[root@localhost /opt/pmx/var/log]#

As we can see I cannot cat a compressed file it is as if it doesn't even exist. I tried zcat on a Red Hat machine and it works fine on .gz compressed logs.

Can anyone input some advice as to what I am doing wrong

Thanks.

zcat is to be used on files created with "compress", i.e. files with a ".Z" extension.

What you want is to view files created with gzip (".gz" extension), which is done with the "gzcat" command.

Thanks for the reply, gzcat worked perfectly. Its odd because in Red Hat I use zcat on .gz files and it works fine. Guess its the Solaris way of doing things.

Actually, not only Solaris but also all BSDs, AIX, HP-UX, Irix and macOS X have gzcat being the right command to uncompress gzipped files.

The gzip developers are to blame here, having reused the name of an existing and slightly different command.

From the gzip manual page:

On some systems, zcat may be installed as gzcat to preserve the original link to compress.