[rsync]

I keep forgetting why I hate systemd (and as a FreeBSD user for all things, I have never used it) and then an article like this reminds me ... binary logs.

Seriously - just reading it is painful. binary logs

That's a lot of things, but it ain't unix.

[ajross]

Meh. You get used to journalctl awfully quickly. For someone who never uses it, it's going to have some friction. You need to remember the command and how to spell it, which I'll admit isn't trivial compared to "just dig around in /var/log" style we're all used to. But you get over that hump in an hour.

For the straightforward "?!$! something happened just grep for it in the log file" it's no harder or slower. And you start noticing things like -f and --since that have no good analogs in the text log world, and it seems like it has value.

And every once in a while you need to pull magic like "show me EVERYTHING that was happening in the 3 seconds before this event, including kernel logs", and that's where it actually makes sense.

I hated it too when I started using it. I don't mind so much now.

[Fnoord]

> For someone who never uses it, it's going to have some friction.

Remember some people never used the previous init and logging systems. They're new to Linux or UNIX, they may be even young (and growing up with Systemd).

Not just in this particular case but more broadly it is important to note there's going to be opponents who are used to X, Y, and Z and don't want to relearn or adapt. It is akin to the never ending progressive vs conservative argument. Just how large is the group though? Is there backwards compatibility? You see, I just use 3 Raspberry Pi's and I am apparently still able to use /var/log.

[XorNot]

journalctl -u <service name> is an amazing improvement on dealing with logs. You get the immediate output of exactly what service you're interested in.

[yAnonymous]

That's nice, but adding it to the old log system is a one-liner, so it's hardly a reason to use Systemd.

[regularfry]

> And you start noticing things like -f and --since that have no good analogs in the text log world, and it seems like it has value.

-f is `less +F`, no?

--since is neat. You could hack it up with a sort and an awk, but it's nice having it built in.

[JimDabell]

> That's a lot of things, but it ain't unix.

UNIX has had binary logs since forever. utmp etc. are traditional UNIX and utmpx is standardised by POSIX.

[Frondo]

Eh, like the other commenter said, you get used to it.

Everything in life is a compromise in one way or another. Using journalctl instead of less? That took me about 5 minutes to commit to memory, and then...that's it.

I don't even think twice anymore about using one command or another to read the contents of the log.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

But you still need less, so now you've added one more command to remember for minimal benefit; less and grep are standard tools for working with everything, journalctl is a one-off.