Where are my Linux Logs?!

No worries, if you feel bit confused about where to find something  in Linux it is pretty usual and it is not your fault!  So regarding to the logs files the situation is the same. I am going to tell you where to find them and the most common paths.

Inconsistency is a critic always attributed to UNIX systems, and we have messy situation also for logs paths.  You could find logs files with  names like maillog, some like cron.log and some other with various distribution and daemon specific naming conventions.

The default path where you can find them is /var/log, but some 'anarchic' applications write their log files elsewhere!

In the list below filename are relative to /var/log. Most of them are maintained by Syslog but others are written directly by applications.

Where:                 F= Configuration file, H = Hardwired, S= Syslog

Frequency:         D= Daily, M= Monthly, NNm= Size-based(in MB,e.g., 1m), W= Weekly

Systems:             D= Debian and Ubuntu (D*= Debian only), R= RedHat and CentOS, F= FreeBSD