Sidebar: Priority Facilities and Levels

syslog priorities are encoded as a facility and a level. The facility describes the part of the system generating the message. The level is selected from an ordered list. Not all systems implement the entire list, but most members of the list will be usable on most systems. When a level is specified, all messages at that level or at a higher level will be reported.

EMERG -- A panic condition. This is normally broadcast to all users.

ALERT -- A condition that should be corrected immediately, such as a corrupted database.

CRIT -- A critical condition, such as a hard device error.

ERR -- Other Errors

WARNING -- Warning messages.

NOTICE -- Conditions that are not error messages, but that may require special handling.

INFO -- Informational messages.

DEBUG -- Messages that contain information normally of use only when debugging a program.

NONE -- Do not send messages from this facility.

The facility parameter encodes a default facility to be assigned to all messages that do not have an explicit facility already encoded.

USER -- Messages generated by user processes. This is the default priority level for messages not listed here.

KERN -- Messages generated by the kernel. These cannot be generated by any user process.

MAIL -- Messages generated by the mail system.

DAEMON -- System daemons, such as ftpd, routed, etc.

AUTH -- The authorization system: login, su, getty, etc.

LPR -- The line printer spooling system: lpr, lpc, lpd, etc.

NEWS -- Reserved for the USENET network news system. Not often implemented.

UUCP -- Reserved for the UUCP system, which currently does not use the syslog mechanism.

CRON -- The cron/at facility: crontab, at, cron, etc.

LOCAL0-7 -- Reserved for local use. You can assign these to your own applications.

MARK -- For time-stamping messages produced internally by syslogd.

* -- All the facilities except for the time stamp or mark.