Re: xconsole messages
"GM" == Guy Maor <maor@ece.utexas.edu> writes:
> GM> Does stuff get written to the files in /var/log and not to the xconsole?
On Thu, 29 Feb 1996, Bill Hogan wrote:
> Exactly.
> Here is my /etc/syslog.conf:
>
> # cat -etv /etc.syslog.conf
> -------------------------------quote ---------------------------------
> (..lines deleted..)
> auth.*;daemon.*;mail.*;news.crit;news.err;news.notice;*.=debug;*.=info;*.=notice;*.=warn;cron.none^I|/dev/xconsole$
> ------------------------------- unquote ------------------------------
> Given this syslog.conf, if I (as root) issue the command
> # xconsole &
Notice that you've made syslogd write to a named pipe called
/dev/xconsole, but you let xconsole read from its default location of
/dev/console. You won't, of course, see the logging messages.
> $ free > /dev/console
Naturally this will work. You should make all your fvwm buttons send
the data to /dev/xconsole and start xconsole with '-file /dev/xconsole'.
Steve Early pointed out that
> When syslogd finds it can't write to a named pipe (because the pipe has
> nothing listening at the other end, for example) it just starts ignoring
> it. When you send it a SIGHUP it will reopen the pipe and start writing
> to it again.
> As long as xconsole gets started reasonably soon after syslogd (eg. in
> the Xsetup_0 script for xdm) you should be ok.
I'm not at my machine right so can't check, but I remember that the max
size of a named pipe is 8k. After that, syslogd will of course stop
writing. Apparently it doesn't start writing again, even though its
writes would succeed.
That's pretty reasonable behaviour. If syslogd would start writing to
the pipe again once it could, there would be missing messages (unless
syslogd saves them, yuk!). Better to let the user restart the logging
with a SIGHUP.
Guy
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