/var/log/{syslog,messages}

[William Pursell <bill.pursell@gmail.com>]

I have a box that powers down pretty regularly, and is
rarely up for more than 24 hours.  I usually shutdown
via /sbin/shutdown from the command line, but occasionally
I'll use the rodent from a kdm screen.  I noticed that
/var/log/messages contains far more "shutting down
for system halt" messages than does /var/log/syslog.

# zgrep halt syslog.*.gz | wc -l; zgrep halt messages.*.gz | wc -l
2
16

My hypothesis is that kdm is logging through syslog, while shutdown
is logging through messages...but it seem odd that kdm doesn't
use shutdown.  Can anyone explain this discrepancy?  (I want
to know date/times for recent shutdowns to compare against
/var/log/aptitude, and I find it annoying that I have to
look in 2 places.)  Is this a bug in kdm?