A tiny cross platform & cross shell, log4j alike, logging library.
The benefits over simple echo statements in your script are:
- Automatically provides timestamps and severity levels to your logfile entries.
- Includes the source hostname, essential in multi host environments.
- Automatically redirects output to stderr for easy filtering of your script's output and it's logging.
- Contains source script filename, which is great if your script calls other scripts.
- Unlike other shell logging libraries, this works across platforms such as MacOS, Linux, Solaris and Cygwin.
- It also works across bourne compatible shells: sh, bash, ksh (both pdksh & ksh93).
From your shell script, simply include the shell-log.sh library:
. shell-log.sh
INFO "This is an info message"
WARN "This is a warning message"
The output for these examples is:
2012-06-30 16:09:57 [Craigs-Mac-Pro.local] INFO (test.sh) This is an info message
2012-06-30 16:09:57 [Craigs-Mac-Pro.local] WARN (test.sh) This is a warning message
You can simply paste the entire contents of shell-log.sh into your script.