With tail, you can view a Linux log file as the system writes to it in real time. So while you’re trying to troubleshoot that system, you can follow the syslog, the auth.log, faillog, kern.log ...

If you really want to see what's happening beneath the hood of your Linux distribution, you need to use log files.

Linux system log files are by default set to rotate. Depending on the age or size, a sequence of files moves back a step, the oldest being removed and a new one taking over as the current log file ...

View the log files Head back to your collector and issue the command sudo tail -f /var/log/syslog-ng/logs.txt. You should see output that includes log entries for both collector and client (Figure A).

Viewing the content of files and examining access permissions and such are very different options. This post examines a number of ways to look at files on Linux.

Last month, we spent a lot of time digging around in the Apache log files to see how you can use basic Linux commands to ascertain some basic statistics about your Web site. You'll recall that even ...