[kashyapc]

Are they really "terrible" with "awful usability"? In my day-to-day debugging, I do find `journalctl` much better. Let's see a couple of quick examples:

- Show logs for the current boot: $ journalctl -b

- To get all errors that are of priority level ERROR and worse: $ journalctl -b -p err

- Show me logs for a given binary: $ journalctl /usr/sbin/libvirtd

- Or via its unit file: $ journalctl -u libvirtd -l

- Want to query all the errors for a given disk? Here we go: $ journalctl /dev/sda -p err

And so on...

[nailer]

I quite like journalctl, but the naming could be better. 'system' means OS, and kernel, and init system, and computer, and many other things. 'start-service' would have been better.

The worst is 'system-cat' to send a log message (SysVInit used 'logger'). Why not just 'log'?

[yarrel]

Yes that is an awful soup of switches that should either be separate commands or usages of existing Unix tools.

[craftyguy]

Ok, then you've traded one command with switches for multiple commands each with their own set of switches (and almost certainly following different switch 'standards'). I like systemctl/journalctl for cleaning up that mess, even if it requires me to learn how to use them.

[kashyapc]

Then you will have an awful salad of separate commands that you have to juggle around. I am all for "UNIX philosophy" within reason; it has its bounds, let us not over-romanticize it.