Re: [logs] tbird rant: syslog.conf, tabs and spaces

loganalysisat_private

On Tuesday, 06 May 2003 at 18:57:27 EDT,
   Tina Bird (Tina Bird <tbird@precision-guesswork.com>) wrote:
> Why the *bleep* can't it be civilized and write a message to the damn
> system log?  Or to the console? Or to its own special logfile?
	NetBSD's version, at least, does complain to console, and
then pretends that those spaces are in fact tabs, as do a fair number
of other versions.  The FUD about spaces between selectors and actions
still persists, however, to the point that on one of those systems
that deals fine with spaces, the manpage claimed (at least as of one or
two years ago) that it was essential to remember not to use spaces in
the file.

	For those who aren't on such a system, or who bounce
between OSes too frequently to be bothered worrying whether today's
OS has issues with spaces or not, here's a quickie that will ID errant
spaces in a syslog.conf file:

$ perl -ne '
   ($s) = /^([^#]\S+\s+)/ and
   $s =~ s/ /<SPACE>/g and
   do { $s =~ s/\t/<TAB>/g ; print "$.: $s\n"; };
' /etc/syslog.conf

	(which returns things like:

25: mark.debug;auth.err<SPACE><SPACE><SPACE>
31: user.debug<SPACE>
33: daemon.debug<TAB><SPACE>

	).  In the same way that lots of systems have a vipw
command to check for errors, I often like to write a wrapper for
syslog.conf to at least check for spaces like this, if not doing a full
syntax check, after each edit.  (The checking can also be done using
sed or awk, so it's even possible to put some logic into your
/etc/init.d/syslogd file (or equivalent) to check for the spaces and
log errors if needed before ever starting syslogd. [1])

	-- Sweth.

[1] sed or awk being necessary since many people don't have perl
    installed on a FS that will be mounted when startup scripts are being
    run.

-- 
Sweth Chandramouli      Idiopathic Systems Consulting
svcat_private      http://www.idiopathic.net/
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