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NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 09 Mar 2012 08:27:38 -0600
Date: Fri, 09 Mar 2012 06:27:35 -0800
From: Patricia Shanahan <pats@acm.org>
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Subject: Re: Logging problem
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On 3/8/2012 9:36 PM, Novice wrote:
...
> It would be very helpful if someone could explain what would happen in a
> real-world production situation where a long-running batch program or a
> constantly-running online program started writing error messages to the
> log. What will operators do to be able to read the log? I'm guessing they
> force it to close early and then start a new file or they have a tool
> that will read the log file correctly even without the final</log>  tag.
>

I'm not an expert on production systems, but all the real-world programs
I've seen that used logging wrote the log to a line-by-line text file.

I've only used XML output in situations in which the output would not be
useful unless the program, or at least the transaction or phase
producing the file, completed successfully, closing its output files in
the process. A log is the opposite of that - it is most useful when the
program crashes horribly in the middle of its work.

Patricia