Write to custom log file from a Bash script

Question

In Linux, I know how to write a simply message to the /var/log/messages file, in a simple shell script I created:

#!/bin/bash
logger \"have fun!\"
<         


        

Answer 1

I did it by using a filter. Most linux systems use rsyslog these days. The config files are located at /etc/rsyslog.conf and /etc/rsyslog.d.

Whenever I run the command logger -t SRI some message, I want "some message" to only show up in /var/log/sri.log.

To do this I added the file /etc/rsyslog.d/00-sri.conf with the following content.

# Filter all messages whose tag starts with SRI
# Note that 'isequal, "SRI:"' or 'isequal "SRI"' will not work.
#
:syslogtag, startswith, "SRI" /var/log/sri.log

# The stop command prevents this message from getting processed any further.
# Thus the message will not show up in /var/log/messages.
#
& stop

Then restart the rsyslogd service:

systemctl restart rsyslog.service

Here is a shell session showing the results:

[root@rpm-server html]# logger -t SRI Hello World!
[root@rpm-server html]# cat /var/log/sri.log
Jun  5 10:33:01 rpm-server SRI[11785]: Hello World!
[root@rpm-server html]#
[root@rpm-server html]# # see that nothing shows up in /var/log/messages
[root@rpm-server html]# tail -10 /var/log/messages | grep SRI
[root@rpm-server html]#