systemd Developer Lennart Poettering lennart@poettering.net journalctl 1 journalctl Query the systemd journal journalctl OPTIONS MATCH journalctl may be used to query the contents of the systemd1 journal as written by systemd-journald.service8. If called without parameter will show the full contents of the journal, starting with the oldest entry collected. If a match argument is passed the output is filtered accordingly. A match is in the format FIELD=VALUE, e.g. _SYSTEMD_UNIT=httpd.service. See systemd.journal-fields7 for a list of well-known fields. Output is interleaved from all accessible journal files, whether they are rotated or currently being written, and regardless whether they belong to the system itself or are accessible user journals. All users are granted access to their private per-user journals. However, by default only root and users who are members of the adm group get access to the system journal and the journals of other users. The following options are understood: --help -h Prints a short help text and exits. --version Prints a short version string and exits. --no-pager Do not pipe output into a pager. --all -a Show all fields in full, even if they include unprintable characters or are very long. --follow -f Show only most recent journal entries, and continously print new entries as they are appended to the journal. --lines= -n Controls the number of journal lines to show, counting from the most recent ones. Takes a positive integer argument. In follow mode defaults to 10, otherwise is unset thus not limiting how many lines are shown. --no-tail Show all stored output lines, even in follow mode. Undoes the effect of --lines=. --output= -o Controls the formatting of the journal entries that are shown. Takes one of short, short-monotonic, verbose, export, json, cat. short is the default and generates an output that is mostly identical to the formatting of classic syslog log files, showing one line per journal entry. short-monotonic is very similar but shows monotonic timestamps instead of wallclock timestamps. verbose shows the full structered entry items with all fiels. export serializes the journal into a binary (but mostly text-based) stream suitable for backups and network transfer. json formats entries as JSON data structures. cat generates a very terse output only showing the actual message of each journal entry with no meta data, not even a timestamp. --quiet -q Suppresses any warning message regarding inaccessable system journals when run as normal user. --local -l Show only locally generated messages. --this-boot -b Show data only from current boot. --directory= -D Takes an absolute directory path as argument. If specified will operate on the specified journal directory instead of the default runtime and system journal paths. --new-id128 Instead of showing journal contents generate a new 128 bit ID suitable for identifying messages. This is intended for usage by developers who need a new identifier for a new message they introduce and want to make recognizable. Will print the new ID in three different formats which can be copied into source code or similar. On success 0 is returned, a non-zero failure code otherwise. $SYSTEMD_PAGER Pager to use when --no-pager is not given; overrides $PAGER. Setting this to an empty string or the value cat is equivalent to passing --no-pager. systemd1, systemd-journald.service8, systemctl1, systemd.journal-fields7, journald.conf5