Exclude from log by pattern matching

Question

I want to exclude some firewall notices and certain benign error messages from the system logs.

They occur every few seconds and make it hard to find real problems, especially when the files get rotated away.

man syslog.conf does not mention string pattern matching like it does on Linux. Can Apple's daemon do it? Are there other options?

Answer 1

The command grep -v allows filtering out a term or regex from the input. You can use a pipe (|) to combine multiple grep -v commands.

Example: grep -v firewall /var/log/system.log | grep -v imagent | grep -v mdworker

The first grep command in this example operates on the file contents; the subsequent grep commands operate on the output of the previous grep command.

grep is located at /usr/bin/grep on my Lion system. For more information on using grep, read the man page with the command man 1 grep or just man grep.

---

Edit: Command line can be shortened to

grep -v 'firewall\|imagent\|mdworker' /var/log/system.log