Hi,

Steve Litt writes:

> What could possibly be easier than vim /var/log/messages, or
> vi /var/log/messages, or emacs /var/log/messages, or
> nano /var/log/messages? And notice with the old way, you have a choice,
> rather than having to look at log output with the vendor's proprietary
> tool.

Maybe I'm peculiar but I always find it absolutely, totally jaw-dropping
when people use text *editors* to *look* at file content. Makes my toes
curl up and blood curdle.

Why on earth would you want to edit your system logs anyway?

On De{bi,vu}an derivatives, I'd use `pager`. On any other Unix-based
OS, I'd use `more` or `less`, preferably.

# On my own machines `lv` makes a fine `pager` for me. On the fly
# decompression and handling of many different encodings. So for me,
# it's just
#
# pager /var/log/syslog.2.gz
#
# without any `zmore` or `zcat` piping. There is still no zpager :-/
# but with `lv` I don't really need one.

Hope this helps,
--
Olaf Meeuwissen, LPIC-2            FSF Associate Member since 2004-01-27
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