How to read *.journal files?

Question

I want to see the previous dmesg log before the reboot. In previous versions of fedora, It used to be in /var/log/messages. But from Fedora 20, it's being stored through systemd i.e. journalctl.

I've a directory /var/log/journal. It has many files and all of them having extension as .journal. I tried to open them with gedit. But couldn't succeed. I tried with notepad++. It's showing unreadable data as if a binary file. How to read them?

score 19 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 28 '22 at 12:09

19

Borrowed from this answer:

journalctl --file

e.g.

journalctl --file /path/to/some/file.journal

As indicated in that answer, these logs are regularly rotated, and may not stretch back as far as you might hope.

edited Jun 28 '22 at 12:09

AdminBee

22,803

answered Jun 12 '19 at 02:04

Stephan

2,911

2

even with sudo I get Failed to open files: Bad message – Sridhar Sarnobat Jul 31 '21 at 18:53
1

It's possible the journal files have become corrupted or unreadble. – Stephan Oct 20 '22 at 01:21
how about reading on a non-systemd box? or non-linux box? – ccpizza Mar 29 '23 at 19:49
1

@ccpizza there's a python module that can parse these files, ref https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26331116/reading-systemd-journal-from-python-script
I'd guess other languages may have similar tools as well.
– Stephan Jun 05 '23 at 16:00

How to read *.journal files?

1 Answers1