Is it just me, or is there a reason for it?

[Tom H]

On Sat, Aug 14, 2010 at 11:11 PM, Steve Lamb <grey at dmiyu.org> wrote:
> On 08/14/2010 03:13 PM, Tom H wrote:
>> There is a reason for such a (relatively) user-unfriendly default in
>> all OSs. Have you ever looked at Windows or OS X logs? They are just
>> as (relatively) obtuse because they are not meant for "ordinary users"
>> but for people who understand them (or who can try to understand
>> them).
>
> Well, OSX has /var/log, too.  Gotta love the most popular unix noone ever
> recognizes as such.  ;)
>
> But yea, every time I have to dig through the event viewer in Windows I
> just wanna shoot whomever thought that was a good idea. I wish it were a
> simple text file I could grep.

OS X is based on FreeBSD so, of course, it has /var/log (and the logs'
style is similar to that of Linux) so the OP would enjoy OS X logs as
much as he enjoys Ubuntu ones, whether he views them through the
command line or the "Console" application.

I've stopped keeping up to date with Windows but I'm sure that there
is a way of running regexes through Win logs. Services for Unix had an
implementation of syslogd that could be used to log to nix boxes but
the last time that I tried to install it I couldn't find an up-to-date
version that would run on a recent box. I _think_ that Cygwin also has
a syslogd-type log system.

I've forgotten what it's called (PowerShell?) but MS has a "shell"
with scripting capabilities that combine bash and perl's that has
builtins to extract data from logs.