Write to custom log file from a Bash script

@chepner make a good point that logger is dedicated to logging messages.

I do need to mention that @Thomas Haratyk simply inquired why I didn't simply use echo.

At the time, I didn't know about echo, as I'm learning shell-scripting, but he was right.

My simple solution is now this:

#!/bin/bash
echo "This logs to where I want, but using echo" > /var/log/mycustomlog

The example above will overwrite the file after the >

So, I can append to that file with this:

#!/bin/bash
echo "I will just append to my custom log file" >> /var/log/customlog

Thanks guys!

• on a side note, it's simply my personal preference to keep my personal logs in /var/log/, but I'm sure there are other good ideas out there. And since I didn't create a daemon, /var/log/ probably isn't the best place for my custom log file. (just saying)

There's good amount of detail on logging for shell scripts via global varaibles of shell. We can emulate the similar kind of logging in shell script: http://www.cubicrace.com/2016/03/efficient-logging-mechnism-in-shell.html The post has details on introdducing log levels like INFO , DEBUG, ERROR. Tracing details like script entry, script exit, function entry, function exit.

Sample Log:

logger logs to syslog facilities. If you want the message to go to a particular file you have to modify the syslog configuration accordingly. You could add a line like this:

local7.*   -/var/log/mycustomlog

and restart syslog. Then you can log like this:

logger -p local7.info "information message"
logger -p local7.err "error message"

and the messages will appear in the desired logfile with the correct log level.

Without making changes to the syslog configuration you could use logger like this:

logger -s "foo bar" >> /var/log/mycustomlog

That would instruct logger to print the message to STDERR as well (in addition to logging it to syslog), so you could redirect STDERR to a file. However, it would be utterly pointless, because the message is already logged via syslog anyway (with the default priority user.notice).