[rquirk]

> "give me 10 hours starting from last Friday 2am"

journalctl --since="$(date -d'last friday 2am' '+%F %X')" --until="$(date -d'last friday 2am + 10 hours' '+%F %X')"

Now I'm no systemd apologist but maybe some of the hate towards systemd, journald and pals is unwarranted. If one gives these newer tools a chance, they actually have some nice features. Despite the Internet's opinion, seems like they were not actually created to make Linux users' lives difficult.

If binary logs turn out to be the wrong technological decision, I'm sure we'll figure that out and change over to text logs again. All it would take is a few key savvy users losing their logs to journald corruption and the change in the wider "ecosystem" would be made. But if all goes well... then what's to complain about? :-D

[erikb]

It's not a counter argument to journalctl's usefulness being independent of binary logs, right? In fact using that nice tool for querying I don't really care how it stores logs under the hood.

[rquirk]

Right, I'm sure you could do the same thing with grep and a classic /var/log/messages - in fact there's probably something to do this already. Or you'd find a gz from the day in question and read all of it. Just happened that I'd recently read the man page for journald and that was something I recalled.