Notice in the screenshot above, I’m examining a turned over log, not the current one. Click on that, and then in the filter bar in the main window, type installed (unlike the grep command I gave you above, this one is not case sensitive and will return both ‘Installed’ and ‘installed’). Click the disclosure triangle if it’s not already pointing downwards and look for install.log. Once Console is open, scroll down the sidebar, looking for /var/log. You can open Console either through Finder by navigating to /Applications/Utilities/Console.app or just by typing ‘cons’ in either Spotlight or Launchpad. It isn’t the actual log file, but rather a local copy of it.Īlternatively, if you don’t feel comfortable in Terminal, you can view all your install logs in the Console.app. When you’re finished viewing this file, you can simply close TextEdit and discard it. Don’t forget you can use TextEdit’s search facility (Command-F) to search for particular instances or items you’re interested in finding. You’ll see at the beginning of the file it’ll tell you when the file was turned over. If you’d like to see the whole log for this reason, or perhaps you want to see whether something failed to install, it’s probably best having the log displayed in TextEdit rather than Terminal, so copy and paste this command into the Terminal window:Ĭat /private/var/log/install.log | open -f If there’s nothing of interest there, but you think there should be, then you’re going to need to see a bit more of the log file, and perhaps find out when it was ‘rotated’ or ‘turned over’ (i.e., the last time the system archived the install.log and created a new one). This will return a list of every item successfully installed since the new log file was created. Grep 'Installed' /private/var/log/install.log Open the Terminal.app (Utilities/Terminal.app) and copy and paste this command: Apple buries the logs deep into parts of OS X that ordinary users typically don’t reach, but fortunately, there’s numerous ways to get at your install logs, and though some of them may be unfamiliar, none of them are particularly difficult or dangerous. Typically, we’re only going to be interested in examining the most recent log file if troubleshooting new problems, but the process that I’m going to describe here can also be used to view the older logs, too. Pro Tip No.1: if you’re a Terminal whizz and you want to change how many old logs are kept or at what size the log file gets turned over, you can edit the /etc/nf file, but be sure to read the man page for newsyslog first. It then compresses and keeps the old logs, typically up to five logs prior to the current one. Secondly, the reason you may have more than one install log is that OS X creates new install logs every time the log file gets to around 1MB in size. The most recent one is simply called install.log, older ones will have a filename ending with. Firstly, chances are you’ll find more than one install log in your logs folder. I’ll tell you how to do that in a moment – in a number of ways – but first let’s just make a few notes. DetectX 2 now has a system analyser that records and displays changes to your system configuration over time.Įver wondered if a link you clicked sneakily downloaded and installed some unwanted software on your mac? Or have you suddenly found your mac behaving weirdly, a situation that is often a result of installing new software that conflicts with something else on the system, but can’t remember what you recently installed? In these sorts of scenarios, what you need to do is check your install logs. UPDATE: I’ve written a free app that pretty much supercedes what I wrote in this post.
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