A.P. Lawrence

Syslogd MARK option

Syslog can be run with a -m " option that just writes "- MARK --" at whatever intervals you specify. The purpose is to provide reassurance that syslogd is listening and doing its job even if it has nothing else to do right now.

I've had people worried by their seeing MARK in logs and not knowing why it was there, but until this thread I'd never seen anyone wondering why it WASN'T there. The reason is that syslogd doesn't bother to write a mark if something else cause it to write a log entry during the interval you specified. After all, the point of -m is to know that syslogd is alive and working, so why write a special mark if it just did real work? That's apparently the attitude of whoever wrote it, and it isn't entirely unreasonable, though as someone mentioned in this thread, it probably should be noted in the documentation.

Comments /Blog/B935.html
CommentsBlog935 :
"Syslog can be run with a -m " option that just writes "- MARK --" at whatever intervals you specify. The purpose is to provide reassurance that syslogd is listening and doing its job even if it has nothing else to do right now."

Of course, you could look at ps -ef | grep syslogd to see if it is alive. <Smile> If the server is running any Internet-style services (e.g., named, sendmail, etc.) log entries are going to appear sooner or later.

:-)

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