# Location of legato app logs

**URL:** <https://forum.legato.io/t/location-of-legato-app-logs/2594>\
**Category:** Uncategorized\
**Created:** [August 10, 2017, 11:31am UTC](https://forum.legato.io/t/location-of-legato-app-logs/2594 "2017-08-10T11:31:30Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![tomalex](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/71e660/32.png) [@tomalex](https://forum.legato.io/u/tomalex)\
**Post date:** [August 10, 2017, 11:31am UTC](https://forum.legato.io/t/location-of-legato-app-logs/2594/1 "2017-08-10T11:31:30Z")

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Dear Community,

Does anybody know where are the live syslogs for legato?  
To my understanding it should be in “/tmp/legato\_logs” but it is not there. Am i missing something?

Thanks  
tom

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**Author:** ![davidc](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/a183cd/32.png) [@davidc](https://forum.legato.io/u/davidc)\
**Post date:** [August 14, 2017, 11:30pm UTC](https://forum.legato.io/t/location-of-legato-app-logs/2594/2 "2017-08-14T23:30:02Z")

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Hiya,

The log implementation on the stock WP85 distribution uses the `Busybox` syslog daemon, and stores the logs to a circular buffer in RAM. Off the top of my head, the RAM buffer is about 200k in size, so as not to fill up the memory of the WP85.

You can get a continuous running display of the log (similar to `tail -f /var/log/kern.log` on a Ubunu system) by opening a separate SSH console window and using the command

```auto
logread -f

```

I did a Legato app some time ago that runs in the background and copies the log to timestamped, hourly files on an external USB flash drive … but I haven’t updated it to use 17.06 yet.

ciao, Dave

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**Author:** ![tomalex](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/71e660/32.png) [@tomalex](https://forum.legato.io/u/tomalex)\
**Post date:** [August 17, 2017, 11:24am UTC](https://forum.legato.io/t/location-of-legato-app-logs/2594/3 "2017-08-17T11:24:43Z")

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Hello Dave,

Thanks for your answer. Yes i know about the logread command and my issue is not so important. I just wanted to give the log as input to a log viewer like otros ([GitHub - otros-systems/otroslogviewer: Log viewer focused on developers work](https://github.com/otros-systems/otroslogviewer)) . It can ssh into the device and read the log.

The /tmp/ directory is actually in RAM. I found this entry “/tmp/legato\_logs” in some config file so it would be logical to be there but it is not. 🙂 But as i said it is not so important and with workaround no problem at all but it is strange that it is not there.

Cheers,  
tom

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**Author:** ![davidc](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/a183cd/32.png) [@davidc](https://forum.legato.io/u/davidc)\
**Post date:** [September 6, 2017, 7:03am UTC](https://forum.legato.io/t/location-of-legato-app-logs/2594/4 "2017-09-06T07:03:36Z")

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Hiya,

As far as I’m aware, by default the logs are _only_ stored in RAM, not even in a tmp file. The **only** way to get them is to use the `logger` application.

You could use a remote SSH command (or maybe socat?) to grab the output and continuously pass it across a network pipe to your host machine.

Or … you could change the configuration of the logger to send the commands to a remote syslog server. The WP uses the `syslogd` from [busybox](https://busybox.net/BusyBox.html) and apparently it can do that. I would **strongly** recommend not configuring `syslogd` to write to a local file on the WP - you could either run out of RAM or FLASH; or worse wear out the FLASH.

ciao, Dave