Is there any program that will let you view logs without having to navigate to each directory?

If not, there should be...no?

Which logs? Which directory(ies)?

find /var/log | less

Maybe I just like gui's, but if there are three or four logs that you are going to all of the time, and maybe some of them are in application folders instead of /var/, wouldn't it be nice to have something like an rss reader to toggle between them.

Or, *gasp* like event viewer in windoze?

It could even be a terminal app where you can tab between subscribed logs.

Or am I just lazy?

Well, that you want it via GUI is an important detail to forget to mention!

Unix/Linux logs are often very large - an RSS reader approach would be overwhelming. I have several hundred thousand lines in my maillogs - do you want to start viewing those line by line in an RSS reader, or try to view these in an browser?

The Windows event viewer is so gawd-awful and slow for any volume, its a toy.

Some things really are better in a plain text environment. You can certainly create yourself a shortcut that launches a shell to view any logs you specify. If you feel you need to see them with eye-candy, do the same thing but open them with your favorite text viewer.

I wouldn't say you're lazy at all. Finding better, faster ways of working is excellent! And I'll suggest to you that there are often better ways of accomplishing a goal if you focus on defining the goal, and not the method. Eg. "How can I obtain important or necessary information from my logs most conveniently"

You are just lazy, but that's OK, who isn't. However Fedora Core or Ubuntu probably already have such a log viewer program. Look though your Administration or System programs, I'm sure you will find one. You will probably need to enter the root password because some logs are only readable by root.

However, some things to look at are not logs but the output of commands, like "who" and "lastb".

Being lazy in reading the logs is OK as long as you are looking at the logs. Being too lazy to find the log viewer program your distro supplies and then complaining about it isn't OK.

Huzzah, Huzzah!

Nice !


For OP, in my Fedora it's

Applications->System Tools->System Log
and enter root passwd

Amazing what you can find by looking...

I'm in Fedora 8 XFCE spin, no such log viewer in system menu or otherwise.

But if there is such a thing that might have been there, what's it's name? When I search google for Log Viewer, there's a redhat-logviewer and some kiwi non-free thing, but those aren't available through yum/revna.

Any other ideas?

I've tried a couple of GUI log viewers in various distros, nothing impressive. Sorry, I don't recall their names.

Yes, it's there, installed and everything - but the menu item is hidden because is flagged as "GNOME desktop only". I found it after goofing around for a while trying out other assorted log viewers - including that "kiwi" garbage. For the record: "redhat-logviewer" is deprecated and performs even worse.

Go to folder /usr/share/applications/ and find the file: gnome-system-log.desktop. Open it (as root user) with a text editor (mousepad will do). Remove or comment out the line:
OnlyShowIn=GNOME;

Give the menu a few minutes to update the cache, or simply logout/login to re-set the menu.

"System Log Viewer" is a GUI for any/all log files. You may need to manually select and open those log files that you want to see. As already stated, folder /var/log/ and subfolders are where most system log files are kept.

V

EDIT: BTW, I ended up downloading and compiling xlogmaster from GNU, which I much prefer anyway. Here's the RPM package I made: xlogmaster-1.6.1-1.1.fc8.i386.rpm

Thanks! Just what I was looking for.

In the future I will be sure to mention my base installation is XFCE....