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Where does tomcat6 put logs by default? catalina.out seems to contain startup/shutdown information in /var/lib/tomcat6/logs, but standard out is either being swallowed or redirected somewhere else. I'm building a scala tomcat web service, and this is my foray into both manual tomcat configuration (more than a preconfigured windows package, at least :P) and scala.

Right now, I need to get the stack trace of an exception being thrown, and I'd really just like to see standard out in tomcat logs. I know that I'd want to use a proper logger at some point, but like I said, this is sort of my "hello world" web service, and I'd rather get this working before worrying about proper logging.

Help?

I'm running tomcat6 (from repos) and Ubuntu 8.10.

Stefan Kendall
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1 Answers1

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If you're using the standard packages, I believe they send it to syslog. You can check the /etc/init.d/tomcat6 file and look to see where -outfile and -errfile are set to. If it's SYSLOG then it's going to syslog, otherwise it's a filename.

The reason for this is because if it's set to a filename, it's impossible to rotate the logs as they're always kept open. You would need to restart tomcat to rotate them. They will just keep growing and growing. I believe a bug has been filed against commons-daemon to allow the files to be reopened on a signal, but I don't know if it's been fixed yet.

David Pashley
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