Filter syslog logs with syslogslicer

commandline

While digging through a pile of syslog log files recently I needed something a little more data format aware than pure grep. So I present the first version of syslogslicer

  • a simple perl script that knows a little bit about the syslog log file format.
 # some example command lines
 syslogslicer -p cron -f program,message /var/log/syslog
 # print the program and message for all lines with program 'cron'

 syslogslicer -p cron -m hourly /var/log/syslog
 # all fields for all lines with program 'cron' and message 'hourly'

 syslogslicer -p cron -m hourly -s 20080810100000 -e 20080810123000 /var/log/syslog
 # all fields for all lines with program 'cron' and message 'hourly'
 # between 20080810100000 and 20080810123000

syslogslicer allows you to filter the output by matching text in the program or log message, only print certain output fields and do basic time based filtering. If you’ve ever wanted to see all the logs raised by postfix with the word ‘database’ in them between 10 and 11 am then this might be the tool for you.