dmesg(1M)

DESCRIPTION

dmesg looks in a system buffer for recently printed diagnostic messages and prints them on the standard output. The messages are those printed by the system when unusual events occur (such as when system tables overflow or the system crashes). If the - argument is specified, dmesg computes (incrementally) the new messages since the last time it was run and places these on the standard output. This is typically used with cron (see cron(1)) to produce the error log /var/adm/messages by running the command:

every 10 minutes.

The arguments core and system allow substitution for the defaults /dev/kmem and /stand/vmunix respectively, where core should be a file containing the image of the kernel virtual memory saved by the savecrash(1M) command and system should be the corresponding kernel. If the system is booted with a kernel other than /stand/vmunix say /stand/vmunix_new, dmesg must be passed this name, the command must be,

WARNINGS

The system error message buffer is of small, finite size. dmesg is run only every few minutes, so there is no guarantee that all error messages will be logged.

AUTHOR

dmesg was developed by the University of California, Berkeley.

FILES

SEE ALSO

savecrash(1M).