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macosloggingsyslog

Stop squashing syslog debug messages on OS X

I'm using syslog to capture logging from an application. I've configured syslog to write my applications logs to an application-specific file in asl.conf:

# Redirect foo to /var/log/foo.log
? [= Sender foo] file /var/log/foo.log

This works, but repeated messages are culled. For example:

Jun 21 17:22:03 hostname.domain foo[346] <Debug>:   This is a message!
Jun 21 17:22:03 --- last message repeated 3 times ---

How can I disable the squashing of repeated messages?

Solution

  • If you restart the syslogd daemon with the option -dup_delay and set the value to 0, it will stop this happening, but it's there to prevent the log getting filled with unnecessary messages.

    More detail of syslogd is described here.