How do you go to the end of the file in journalctl?

Question

If I type sudo journalctl I get the system journal in some kind of a reader. Pressing j and k works like in Vi but G does not go to the end of the file. In fact, if press G, the stream freezes and I have forcibly terminate it.

No mention of using the reader is in the man page for journalctl.

score 43 · Accepted Answer · edited Nov 27 '22 at 15:10

43

that "reader" is just less.

No mention of using the reader is in the man page for journalctl.

err, said man page:

The output is paged through `less` by default,

but:

but G does not go to the end of the file. In fact, if press G, the stream freezes and I have forcibly terminate it.

G works beautifully, the log is just very long, so it's searching for a long time until it reaches the end.

from the man page:

  -e, --pager-end
      Immediately jump to the end of the journal inside the implied pager 
      tool. This implies -n1000 to guarantee that the pager will not buffer 
      logs of unbounded size. This may be overridden with an explicit -n 
      with some other numeric value, while -nall will disable this cap. 
      Note that this option is only supported for the less(1) pager.

So,

journalctl -e

is what you want to run!

edited Nov 27 '22 at 15:10

tanius

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answered Jun 16 '21 at 20:55

Marcus Müller

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Or pass `--no-pager` if you just want to see it and now have it stop. – Marc Wilson Jun 17 '21 at 22:54
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Note that adding `--pager-end` seems to trim the output to 1000 latest lines. – Osman-pasha Sep 02 '22 at 08:18
@Osman-pasha is it trimmed or is that the size of your console buffer? – Blaise Jan 08 '23 at 19:58
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@Blaise it's trimmed by `journalctl` itself, as per `man` (see the text in the answer): – Osman-pasha Jan 10 '23 at 09:58
_"G works beautifully, the log is just very long, so it's searching for a long time until it reaches the end."_ That's for sure! It takes like a minute to find the end of this file with this command. I bet this file is gigabytes in size. – Gabriel Staples Jun 26 '23 at 05:34

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 26 '23 at 06:12

Adding onto @Marcus Müller's excellent answer:

# show only the last 1000 lines of the systemd journal (`-n 1000` is implied),
# jumping straight to the end (`-e`)
journalctl -e

# same as above
journalctl -n 1000 -e

# same as above, except show the last 10000 lines instead of 1000 lines
journalctl -n 10000 -e

You can prove this is working by counting the lines. Run and output:

$ journalctl -n 10000 -e | wc -l
10020

This is soooo much faster than running journalctl directly, as my log is loooooooooong, and it takes like a full minute to read to the end of it otherwise.

How do you go to the end of the file in journalctl?

2 Answers2