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History log of /src/usr.sbin/syslogd/syslogd.8
RevisionDateAuthorComments
 1.61  05-Jun-2025  christos PR/59455: Aaron: Added CAVEATS section from OpenBSD about syslogd not creating
files, but only logging to existing files.
 1.60  21-Aug-2024  gutteridge syslogd.8 & syslogd.c: add -k option

Provide a means of disabling the translation of (remote) messages
received with facility kern to facility user. Feature equivalent to
what FreeBSD added years ago, though the code is slightly different
(a bit easier to follow expressively). Patches from RVP, provided in
PR lib/57172 (with very minor tweaks by me).
 1.59  08-Nov-2022  uwe branches: 1.59.4;
syslogd: make -d accept an optional argument

Make it possible to specify the debug message categories with an
optional numeric argument. You'll have to read the fine source to
find out what they are. The number can be specified as the usual
decimal, hex (0x), or octal (0) literal with an optional ~negation.

Since syslogd uses getopt(3), not getopt_long(3), do a bit of
gymnastics so that both -d42 and -d 42 are accepted (I'm not inventing
long names for all the existing options just to support an optional
argument to -d).

-d without an argument still uses the old D_DEFAULT selection just in
case someone really relies on that. You can disable all debug
messages with -d0 but still get syslogd not daemonized.
 1.58  05-Nov-2018  wiz Sort options.
 1.57  04-Nov-2018  roy syslogd: allow the reporting of buffer overflows to be disabled.

This generally isn't a good thing, nothing should be discard silently.
However, for systems that don't want big syslogd buffers or are too slow
to log effectively this reporting can now be disabled.
 1.56  04-Nov-2018  roy syslogd: allow the receiving buffer size to be set.

This allows the admin to try and avoid buffer overflow when a log of
logging appears in bursts.
 1.55  03-Jul-2017  wiz branches: 1.55.4; 1.55.6;
Remove workaround for ancient HTML generation code.
 1.54  14-Jan-2013  dholland fix thinko
 1.53  30-Oct-2012  wiz Remove trailing whitespace.
 1.52  30-Oct-2012  rkujawa Note enchancements that appeared in NetBSD 6.0.
 1.51  08-Apr-2012  wiz branches: 1.51.2;
Remove unnecessary Bk/Ek pairs from SYNOPSIS.
No effective change except where I used the opportunity to sort options
and/or option descriptions.
 1.50  28-Mar-2012  christos add aliases for the protocol format
 1.49  15-Oct-2009  plunky branches: 1.49.6;
reinstate a sentence partly removed in v1.43 regarding the default
facility/priority for local kernel messages
 1.48  16-Jul-2009  yamt draft-ietf-syslog-protocol-23 -> RFC 5424
 1.47  01-Feb-2009  wiz Bump date for previous.
 1.46  01-Feb-2009  yamt note some options' optarg in DESCRIPTION as well.
 1.45  01-Feb-2009  yamt make -o option consistent with others.
 1.44  07-Nov-2008  minskim Remove trailing whitespace.
 1.43  31-Oct-2008  christos Import syslogd SoC project by Martin Schuette:
- new syslog protocol api syslogp(3) that supports structured data
and draft-rfc timestamps
- reliable tcp connections with queueing
- encrypted connections
 1.42  15-Sep-2006  christos branches: 1.42.2; 1.42.12; 1.42.24;
PR/14563: Brian A. Seklecki: syslogd binds udp sockets on all interfaces
Add -b option to pass a bind address.
 1.41  23-Apr-2006  wiz Add -T to SYNOPSIS.
 1.40  23-Apr-2006  wiz Fix typo.
 1.39  19-Apr-2006  pavel PR 32579: Add a -T flag to syslogd, which causes it to use local time for
messages received from the network. Useful for collecting logs from
devices which do not have correct time.

Add it to usage.

Document it, also document that syslogd adds a timestamp with the local
time if it does not recognize the original timestamp field. Bump date.

Approved by wrstuden@.
 1.38  20-Jan-2006  wiz Add reference to RFC 3164. From Pavel Cahyna in PR 32578.
 1.37  19-Nov-2004  wiz branches: 1.37.2; 1.37.4; 1.37.6;
Fix typo, and make HTML-save.
 1.36  19-Nov-2004  thorpej Merge the thorpej-syslogd-hack-branch down to the trunk. Enhancements
include:

- Extend the syntax of syslog.conf to allow selections of log destinations
by comma-separated lists of program name (including kernel-generated
messages) and originating host name.
- Ability to pipe selected messages through arbitrary filter commands.
- Ability to specify priority comparison operations.
- Improvements to domain name handling.
- Conversion to use kqueue for communication and signal events, eliminating
all unsafe signal handlers.
- Allow spaces as well as tabs in syslog.conf.
- Log kernel printfs at LOG_NOTICE instad of LOG_CRIT.
- Ability to log facility/priority with a log message.
- Reliability improvements.
 1.35  10-Oct-2004  wiz branches: 1.35.2;
Add -S to SYNOPSIS; sort descriptions; bump date for new -S flag.
 1.34  08-Oct-2004  mycroft Don't fsync() kernel messages by default -- enable it with the "-S" flag.
This avoids some seriously gratuitous disk hosage in various cases.

XXX It would probably be better to allow this to be specified in the config
file somehow.
 1.33  17-Oct-2003  lukem Implement -r, which prevents syslogd from compressing multiple messages with
the same string into "last message repeated N times", and instead forces
syslogd to write out every message.

Based on '-c' in FreeBSD's syslogd, although a different option letter was
chosen because their syslogd requires '-c -c' to get this functionality,
and we don't have the support for logging to pipes which is what FreeBSD's
syslogd with a single '-c' is related to.
 1.32  07-Aug-2003  agc Move UCB-licensed code from 4-clause to 3-clause licence.

Patches provided by Joel Baker in PR 22366, verified by myself.
 1.31  14-May-2003  wiz setup -> set up.
 1.30  06-May-2003  wiz New sentence, new line.
 1.29  02-May-2003  gmcgarry Add an explanation of the log format. From PR#14290.
 1.28  25-Feb-2003  wiz .Nm does not need a dummy argument ("") before punctuation or
for correct formatting of the SYNOPSIS any longer.
 1.27  25-May-2002  wiz Sort options in man page, don't mention non-existing '-S' option,
use some more markup and improve existing one.
Sync usage() with man page.
 1.26  25-May-2002  wiz Grammar fixes and a markup fix.
 1.25  02-Feb-2002  wiz branches: 1.25.2;
Drop a .Pp, sort SEE ALSO.
 1.24  19-Jan-2002  wiz Whitespace nits.
 1.23  16-Jul-2001  manu - No more lost error messages during syslogd startup, they now all appear on
stdout before syslogd becomes a daemon.
- Flags for setuid/setgid/chroot syslogd after initialization is completed
- Warning instead of silent ignoring for malformed lines (with spaces instead
of tags)
Approved by Christos
 1.22  01-Jul-2001  itojun -DLIBWRAP will enable libwrap-based filtering on UDP socket messages.
PR 13348
 1.21  08-Jun-2001  mrg new `-n' switch to avoid looking up hostnames.
 1.20  03-May-2001  wiz Logical markup. Reported in bin/12816 by Tetsuya Isaki.
 1.19  11-Jul-2000  ad Xr newsyslog.
 1.18  30-Jun-2000  jwise Remove caveat about behavior of `syslogd -s' when forwarding rules are
present -- this behavior has been fixed.
 1.17  30-Jun-2000  jwise Back out and redo previous at Bill Sommerfeld's <sommerfeld@netbsd.org>
request:

instead of the -S flag, fix the -s flag to not open a socket
if there are no forwarding rules in /etc/syslog.conf

The behavior of syslogd when -s is specified and there are forwarding rules
should still be made cleaner.
 1.16  30-Jun-2000  jwise 1.) bring usage text up to date, and clarify description of `-s' option
in man page and comments -- for some time it has no longer prevents
an inet socket from being opened, just caused it to be ignored

2.) Fix this problem with `-s' -- syslogd always opens an inet socket, even if
-s is specified and it has nowhere to send to. This socket is then
shutdown(), but there is no way to not have this socket open.

Users setting up paranoid installations can now specify `-S' which
prevents any non-unix-domain sockets from being opened, even if
forwarding is specified in /etc/syslogd.conf.

As per the previous fix, this is not made the default for `-s', as it
also prevents syslogd from forwarding log messages.

3.) document the above in the man page and usage.

Justification: in light of the possibility of future DoS attacks, or the
desire to set up a machine which is relatively uninformative in the face
of port scans, users may quite legitimately want to control what sockets
are open on their machine. Telling such users that they cannot run
syslogd is non-ideal.
 1.15  30-Nov-1999  ad branches: 1.15.4;
- Fix location of RCS Id string.
- It's now syslogd.pid, not syslog.pid.
 1.14  10-Sep-1999  simonb branches: 1.14.4;
s/acknowledgment/acknowledgement/
 1.13  22-Mar-1999  garbled More and more .Os cleanups. .Os is defined in the tmac.doc-common file,
so we shouldn't override it with versions in the manpages. Many more to
come.
 1.12  19-Mar-1999  perry /var/run/log.
 1.11  15-Mar-1999  is /dev/log moved to /var/run/syslog.socket.
 1.10  07-Mar-1999  mycroft Clean up SYNOPSIS formatting.
 1.9  21-Feb-1999  mrg - allow -p /log/socket to appear more than once (and work as expected
if given this). this is extremely useful for chrooted daemons that
still want to create log entries via a local mechanism.

- create a new -P option that takes a filename of log sockets (equiv.
of calling syslogd which -p <each line of file>. this is useful
for the case of many chroot areas and keeping this information in
one place rather than having to remember it all.

if no -p options are given, the default (_PATH_LOG) is used as normal.
 1.8  28-Apr-1998  fair Change occurrences of "UNIX" to .Ux or .At as appropriate.
 1.7  17-Oct-1997  lukem minor .Nm cleanup
 1.6  08-Mar-1997  mouse alternate -> alternative, per PR 2643
 1.5  06-May-1996  christos Fix PR/2371, a spelling error and missing -s from the description.
 1.4  05-Feb-1996  perry Added code to implement mode in which syslogd listens only to unix
domain socket (triggered by -s option) and documentation for
same. This closes pr 1761, although the code is slightly different.
 1.3  02-Jan-1996  perry Merge/sync with 4.4lite2. Fixed HISTORY line for syslog.conf.5. Note
that the claim in the HISTORY line for syslogd.8 that it appeared in
4.3BSD is probably bogus -- I remember it being a lot older.
 1.2  01-Aug-1993  mycroft Add RCS indentifiers.
 1.1  21-Mar-1993  cgd branches: 1.1.1;
Initial revision
 1.1.1.2  28-Dec-1995  perry imported from 44lite2
 1.1.1.1  21-Mar-1993  cgd initial import of 386bsd-0.1 sources
 1.14.4.1  27-Dec-1999  wrstuden Pull up to last week's -current.
 1.15.4.2  20-Jul-2000  ad Pull up rev 1.19 from trunk: Xr newsyslog.
 1.15.4.1  30-Jun-2000  jwise Pullup revs syslogd.8 1.15->1.18 and syslogd.c 1.34->1.38:

Make -s work as advertised. (Not only not listen on udp/514, but don't
bind the socket, and don't create the socket if it is not needed for
forwarding actions).

Pullup approved by Jason Thorpe (thorpej@netbsd.org)
 1.25.2.1  25-May-2002  perry resolve 1.6 pullup ticket #23 from wiz
pulls up revisions 1.26, 1.27
Original commit messages:

> Grammar fixes and a markup fix.

and

> Sort options in man page, don't mention non-existing '-S' option,
> use some more markup and improve existing one.
 1.35.2.3  18-Nov-2004  thorpej Add the ability to specify how the priority should be compared in
syslog.conf, e.g.:

*.<notice
*.=err
*.>=debug

Add a -U option that changes the default comparison from ">=" to "=".

Add a -v option that causes the facility and priority to be logged with
the message. One -v logs it numerically, a second -v logs it by name.

From FreeBSD, with the exception of changing the unique priority option
to -U (we already have a -u).
 1.35.2.2  17-Nov-2004  wiz Bump date for defaults documentation.
 1.35.2.1  17-Nov-2004  thorpej Document the default facility and priority that syslogd uses for
untagged messages.
 1.37.6.1  26-Feb-2009  snj Apply patch (requested by bouyer in ticket #1990):
Fix typo: LOT_NOTICE -> LOG_NOTICE.
 1.37.4.1  26-Feb-2009  snj Apply patch (requested by bouyer in ticket #1990):
Fix typo: LOT_NOTICE -> LOG_NOTICE.
 1.37.2.1  26-Feb-2009  snj Apply patch (requested by bouyer in ticket #1990):
Fix typo: LOT_NOTICE -> LOG_NOTICE.
 1.42.24.1  02-Feb-2009  snj Apply patch (requested by bouyer in ticket #392):
Fix typo: LOT_NOTICE -> LOG_NOTICE.
 1.42.12.1  26-Feb-2009  snj Apply patch (requested by bouyer in ticket #1272):
Fix typo: LOT_NOTICE -> LOG_NOTICE.
 1.42.2.1  26-Feb-2009  snj Apply patch (requested by bouyer in ticket #1272):
Fix typo: LOT_NOTICE -> LOG_NOTICE.
 1.49.6.3  23-Jan-2013  yamt sync with head
 1.49.6.2  16-Jan-2013  yamt sync with (a bit old) head
 1.49.6.1  17-Apr-2012  yamt sync with head
 1.51.2.2  25-Feb-2013  tls resync with head
 1.51.2.1  20-Nov-2012  tls Resync to 2012-11-19 00:00:00 UTC
 1.55.6.1  10-Jun-2019  christos Sync with HEAD
 1.55.4.1  26-Nov-2018  pgoyette Sync with HEAD, resolve a couple of conflicts
 1.59.4.1  02-Aug-2025  perseant Sync with HEAD

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