NAME

Parse::Syslog - Parse Unix syslog files

SYNOPSIS

 my $parser = Parse::Syslog->new('/var/log/syslog', year=>2001);
 while(my $sl = $parser->next) {
     ... access $sl->{timestamp|host|program|pid|text} ...
 }

DESCRIPTION

Unix syslogs are convenient to read for humans but because of small differences between operating systems and things like 'last message repeated xx times' not very easy to parse by a script.

Parse::Syslog presents a simple interface to parse syslog files: you create a parser on a file (with new) and call next to get one line at a time with Unix-timestamp, host, program, pid and text returned in a hash-reference.

Constructing a Parser

new requires as first argument a file-name for the syslog-file to be parsed.

After the file-name you can specify options as a hash. The following options are defined:

year

Syslog files usually do store the time of the event without year. With this option you can specify the start-year of this log. If not specified, it will be set to the current year.

repeat

Parse::Syslog will by default repeat xx times events that are followed by messages like 'last message repeated xx times'. If you set this option to false, it won't do that.

Parsing the file

The file is parse one line at a time by calling the next method, which returns a hash-reference containing the following keys:

timestamp

Unix timestamp for the event.

host

Host-name where the event did happen.

program

Program-name of the program that generated the event.

pid

PID of the Program that generated the event. This information is not always available for every operating system.

text

Text description of the event.

msgid

Message numeric identifier, available only on Solaris >= 8 with "message ID generation" enabled".

facility

Log facility name, available only on Solaris >= 8 with "message ID generation" enabled".

level

Log level, available only on Solaris >= 8 with "message ID generation" enabled".

BUGS

There are many small differences in the syslog syntax between operating systems. This module has been tested for syslog files produced by the following operating systems:

    Debian GNU/Linux 2.4 (sid)
    Solaris 2.6
    Solaris 8

Report problems for these and other operating systems to the author.

COPYRIGHT

Copyright (c) 2001, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich. All Rights Reserved.

This module is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

AUTHOR

David Schweikert <dws@ee.ethz.ch>