20 Dec
2001
20 Dec
'01
1:33 p.m.
what is the purpose of ---MARK---? I know it just fills up my logs, but I never really understood why I'd want that ...
Suggestions? What do other people use it for?
you can use it to test if your logging daemon is operational, even if nothing gets logged. Other than that, it can come in quite handy when manually parsing through logs, because you can easily skip a bunch of lines (same can be done by searching for date/time, but that's more ty- ping) ...
Out of paranoia, I used to run a daemon that would check the logs for the mark. This way, I knew logging was still functional. It paid off once when syslog(not ng) mysteriously died.