I'm working with a tcsh script that was written by someone else.

In that script, there's a line with a single command "journal".

there's no man page for journal

it's not in the tcsh man page.

there's no help card.

it's a compiled file so I can't simply read it:

file `which journal`
/usr/bin/journal: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), for GNU/Linux 2.4.1, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.4.1, stripped


I haven't found any good results by googling as it's too generic of a word.

does anyone know what it does?

How about 'apropos'? Your distro's package management tools?


How about running 'nm', 'ldd' and something like 'strings -an4' on it for possible clues?
Or compare MAC times with other installed system stuff at that epoch?


A quick search of the man sections and apropos for .*BSD.*, HP-UX, Ultrix, Solaris, .*linux.*, Plan 9 and other assorted dinosaurs revealed exactly zilch.

DING DING DING! I didn't know about "strings." What a useful command. It appears that this was written by my predecessor as it has my company's name in it as well as a few mysql calls.

Thanks for the help.