The Mac Observer Express Daily Newsletter Site Navigation. By & Console Yourself: Understanding Mac OS X Logs August 3rd, 2001 Underneath the bright and shiny new Aqua interface of Mac OS X comes a completely new Unix foundation that is unlike anything Mac OS users have experienced before. One of the most attractive aspects of this new foundation is the set of industrial-strength networking applications that come with it. We've looked at many of these in. They include things like,,, FTP (File Transfer Protocol) and robust, the world's most popular Web server.

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As an inseparable part of all this Unix technology we are also welcome to the world of logs. Logs are text files that form a record of what has occurred on the system, much like a journal. This column will serve as an intro to some of the key logs that you'll find on your Mac OS X system. We'll start by looking at the system console log. So if you can't see the wood for the trees, console yourself and delve into the wonderful world of logs. The console app Take a look in the Applications/Utilties folder of your Mac OS install you'll find a little application named 'Console.' If you've ever tried running this app you'll have seen how it likes popping to the front of your screen every now and then and flashing some nearly intelligible textual messages for a second.

What this program is actually doing is monitoring a little file called 'console.log' that is stored deep down in the filesystem at the following location: /private/var/tmp/console.log Everytime something new gets written to that file the Console app flashes its window up to the front and lets you know what's happening. So what sort of things get written to that file? Most often, the answer is error messages and warnings. All programs that are running on the machine will occasionally emit error, warning and status messages in a textual form. If the events they refer to aren't significant enough to demand a user's immediate attention, then they usually get routed to a log somewhere, and it is the console.log that gets many of them. Unfortunately, the Console application leaves a lot to be desired. This app is a simple front-end to the Unix command line tool 'tail.'

When you run the graphical Console application what it is actually doing is issuing a 'tail -f /private/var/tmp/console.log' command behind the scenes, taking the output from that command and displaying it in a pretty Aqua window. (The tail command, as the name suggests, shows the tail end of a file. The '-f' switch instructs the tail command to stay running and 'follow' the file, continually watching the end and printing out any additional lines that get written to it.) A much more impressive way of displaying the console.log file is to use an excellent application called.

This tiny 66 kilobyte app will follow the console.log file (or any other number of text files you nominate) and display them in a transparent window at the very back of your screen. As shown in the screen shot below, this creates the illusion that the log files are actually being written to your desktop picture in real time. Click the image for a. This is the best type of eye candy because it serves a functional purpose in addition to being aesthetically pleasing and unobtrusive.

As a quick glance at on the MacNN forums will show, many people have been using DesktopConsole to help them monitor FTP or HTTP (web) access to their machines. Analyzing logs These logs can be confusing, even to experienced Unix users. Although I am reasonably familiar with various types of Unix, I still find that there are many, many, many lines in logs that I do not understand. Convert wps file to doc file.