iopeverything.blogg.se - Mac log files

#MAC LOG FILES PLUS#
#MAC LOG FILES MAC#

See the blue box below for help deciphering the contents. You can view the logs via the Console app, in the tan box below, or just double-click it to display it. You can safely delete any or all of them, but unless space is critical, try to leave the system.log file, at least temporarily, so you can examine it to determine what's wrong (if you do need to delete it, the system will create a new one almost immediately). files (the ones with bz2 suffixes are compressed).

Your system.log and/or system.log.0.bz2, etc.

If there are a lot of files here, you may have the next problem, too: That means your Mac's automatic maintenance isn't running. There should be dated files for the last week or so if there are many more, select the old ones and delete them (you'll have to enter your Admin password), then empty the trash.

#MAC LOG FILES PLUS#

Click the disclosure triangle, and you should see a series of files named by date, plus a couple of others. If all the sizes aren't shown, select View > Show View Options from the menubar, and check the Calculate all sizes box towards the bottom.Īnything over 1 GB is an indication of a problem. If the size column isn't shown, select View > Show View Options from the menubar, and check the size box. The daily, weekly, and monthly periodic "Maintenance scripts," outlined in orange, are explained in OSX Maintenance Scripts. System.log is the current version the system.log.0.bz2, etc., files towards the bottom are the "archived" and compressed previous versions, usually one per day or so. See the pink box below for details on crash logs.Īlso note that the system.log is shown twice once towards the top, right under the FILES folder, and again towards the bottom, usually followed by some similar ones (outlined in blue). Those will be in the Diagnostic folder(s) on Snow Leopard.) (On Leopard, there may be a HangReporter folder, where you'll find logs on processes that have stalled.

And sometimes the same log is shown in 2 or 3 places. Each crash log file is named with the name of the app or process that crashed, and the date. There may be as many as four Diagnostic folders, some showing the same files. Note the Diagnostic and CrashReporter folders (outlined in red). To view a particular log, just select it in the sidebar, unless it's shown in gray, meaning you don't have permission to read it. To see a different user's logs, you must sign on with that user account (but note their crash logs may be duplicated in the upper section).

The logs outlined in green are in the logged-on user's /Library/Logs folder.

See the pink box for information about Crash (or Hang) logs, once you've found them.Īll Macs will have roughly the same structure of folders, and many of the same logs, but different versions of OSX will vary somewhat (the sample is from Snow Leopard), and there may be different logs & folders depending on what apps you have and use.

To locate and read your logs, use the Console application.

To see the sizes of your logs, if you suspect a problem, use the Finder, per the green box.

Time Machine Buddy widget (on the Time Machine - Troubleshooting site).

To view only the messages from Time Machine backups from the last few days, see #A1.

It's usually best to do this while logged-on as an Admin user, as others don't have permission to read many of them.

They can be seen in a couple of ways, depending on your purpose. This is a general overview, with some detail on selected topics. But they can be very useful to help diagnose a problem.

#MAC LOG FILES MAC#

Most of it seems rather cryptic, meant for developers and others trying to diagnose problems, and many Mac users never have a reason to look at them. Your Mac contains numerous log files, with all sorts of information, sent by various system processes and applications.