Logging

Finding Errors in the systemd Journal

We’ll dive deep into the systemd journal in a later chapter, but for now here are a few common invocations.

Search for errors in the entire system log

When you’re trying to get a general idea of what’s wrong on a system, look for errors accross all services:

journalctl -xe

This command will search the system log for error messages, and let you page through them (spacebar, arrow keys, Page Up / Page Down). Like other systemd commands, you can ‘quit’ the output pager with q.

If you want to do the same thing, except:

• starting at the bottom of the log which contains the most recent entries, and
• live-updating the log for new entries,

you can use the -f flag to follow the log:

journalctl -xef

Search for errors in specific services or programs (“Units”)

To narrow your search to a specific unit (foobar) that’s misbehaving:

journalctl -xeu foobar

As with other journalctl commands,...