strange zipped .gz logs in console

Hello all,

After I experienced some strange behaviour with my mini and mouse (a tablet that suddenly began ctrl clicking whenever i clicked any button) and a major slow down to my system for about 2-3 minutes while i was transcoding video file with VLC, I decided to check my console to see if there was any error/crash logs and noticed that there are multiple zipped (.gz) logs in the /var/log part. for every log file such as install, ipfw, ipr etc i have another labelled, for example install.log.0.gz.

These are zipped files as I can actually locate them by command clicking them in the title bar of console.

I do not have any of these on my powerbook. AND also, I can't seem to access the system log from my non-admin account. which I can do on my powerbook.

Can anyone please explain what the deal is with these zipped files?

Thanks

PowerBook G4 12 combo, Mac Mini (G4), Mac OS X (10.4.7)

Posted on Jul 5, 2006 12:02 AM

Jul 29, 2006 5:22 AM in response to Naj

Hi again, Naj!

I take it all is Ok seeing as the maintenance has actually run?

Well, yes, but of course you'll now find that you are unable to read the system.log in a non-admin account on the PB as well.

After about 8 log rotations, the zipped file with group "wheel", and 'r' permission for "other" will drop off the bottom. You can always force running the maintenance scripts if you wish, see: Mac OS X: How to Force Background Maintenance Tasks (Logs and Temporary Items), althought this isn't essential.

You can also check when the maintenance tasks last ran using the Terminal (use copy and paste):

ls -l /var/log/*.out

In your example, I would expect the date & timestamp on daily.out to match that on system.log.0.gz. Try it and see!