shell script for checking if the system logs are updating

[coollllllllllll]

Hi ,

Need a script to check whether  system logs are updating .

I have a perl one liner here , from this forum only to check in last 1 hour ;

perl -le 'exit 1 if -M "/var/opt/resmon/log/event.log" > 3600/86400'

But its not working ; my event.log file is not updated for last 3 months , still it doent throw any error.

Any reason why is it so ?

[Patrick Wallek]

The fact that your event log is not changing is not necessarily a bad thing.  It means that EMS is not detecting any events that it needs to notify you about. 

If you want to send a test event to EMS to verify that an event will get logged in that file you can do:

# /etc/opt/resmon/lbin/send_test_event -v disk_em

Then check the /var/opt/resmon/log/event.log file to see if it has the test event.  You can also just view this file via 'vi' or 'more' as it is a plain ASCII text file.

[coollllllllllll]

Hi Patrick ,

Its not about event log not getting updated.

What am saying is the perl liner given above should exit with value 1right , if the event.log is not updated in last 1 hr ?

Its not throwing me value of 1.

Kindly sugeest.

[Matti_Kurkela · Accepted solution]

Your one-liner will never produce any output. Instead, it will set its return value to 1 if the condition is true.

In other words, it should work like this:

# perl -le 'exit 1 if -M "/var/opt/resmon/log/event.log" > 3600/86400'

# echo $?
1

The return value is often easier to handle in scripts than explicitly catching and interpreting the output. For example, you might do something like this:

#!/bin/sh

if perl -le 'exit 1 if -M "/var/opt/resmon/log/event.log" > 3600/86400'
then
    echo "No new events within the last hour"
else
    echo "A new event has been received within the last hour"
fi