A typical UNIX® or Linux® machine creates many log files during the course of its operation. Some of these contain useful information; others can be used to help you with capacity and resource planning. This article looks at the fundamental information recorded within the different log files, their location, and how that information can be used to your benefit to work out what is going on within your system.
Traditionally, Unix/Linux/POSIX filenames can be almost any sequence of bytes, and their meaning is unassigned. The only real rules are that "/" is always the directory separator, and that filenames can't contain byte 0 (because this is the terminator). Although this is flexible, this creates many unnecessary problems. In particular, this lack of limitations makes it unnecessarily difficult to write correct programs (enabling many security flaws), makes it impossible to consistently and accurately display filenames, causes portability problems, and confuses users. more ....
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