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The tragedy of having to resort to the log command is that it discards the structured data in log extracts, unless you happen to wire it up to a passing database capable of importing its copious JSON exports. And that’s but a cursory overview of its thorough impotence. It can’t display all the fields which are saved in log entries, pretends that signposts don’t exist, can’t save anything to a file, and can only copy entries in unstructured format. There are two ways in which you can now view existing (historical) entries in the unified log: in Console, create a logarchive file and browse that, or resort to the complexities of the log command in Terminal.Įven now, Console version 1.1 (with just one minor version increment over four corresponding major releases of macOS) is the most featureless log browser I’ve ever seen.

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So how to look at an event which happened a couple of minutes ago, or last night? Some users even thought that logs were no longer stored, but ephemeral messages which shot past in Console’s window. Instead of the traditional view of log entries which had been collected, we are presented with a window on a live stream. Opening Console came as a bit of a shock, though.

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Rather than a simple stream of timestamped text, the log is now structured data which has gone on to include activities and signposts, so developers can analyse performance and get to grips with non-debug versions of their software running on user systems, and much more. In principle, this was a big step forward. Then in 2016, with the release of Sierra, Apple changed to its new unified log. Whether it is an application that keeps unexpectedly quitting, or bouts of the spinning beachball, many mysteries can be solved when you spend a little time browsing contemporaneous log entries.” Console (Yosemite) showing log entries for a typical restart. Much may be hidden behind OS X’s friendly Finder and other front-end refinements, but when you need to trace and diagnose a problem, you should turn to Console and the riches of its logs. Are you scared to open Console, or panic when you scroll through its contents?

“When something goes wrong with your Mac, the best clues are usually found in the log.

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That app just crashed? What caused your kernel panic? What went wrong at two o’clock in the morning? Over the more than thirty years that I’ve been writing Q&A pages for Mac magazines, I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve asked users to look in their log, or to send me log extracts so I can try to work out what went wrong. Deprived of them, advanced users, sysadmins and developers alike struggle blindfolded in the dark. Logs and their browsers are humdrum, everyday tools which are as sexy as soupkitchens and as essential as sleep. Which important utility (bundled with macOS) did you use then, but almost never use today? Could it be Console, the log browser? Last Sunday, I wrote about the tools and fundamentals which Apple needs to get right in macOS 10.16, and at the end mentioned the case of Console, the vital tool that Apple abandoned when it introduced the unified log in Sierra.