because linux/application developers think it is the best way to do, some of which I can think of

(r)syslog provides a centralized log handling mechanisms like in case you want to collect all your servers logs to get them digested/analyzed in one place for better monitoring of your servers,

other reason is to have the failure file permissions and other situations to be handled by (r)syslog rather the application suffering to start because the log file is not there or needed permissions are not there.

While rotating logs copytruncate is not the default rotating method configured in logrotate. In that case you end up maintain log rotate configuration too if you want your application to handle writing its logs and to avoid service restart.

Am sure there are many other use cases which is worth using (r)syslog to handle log writing.

On 11/6/15, Christian Kivalo <ml+dovecot@valo.at> wrote:

Hi

Am 06. November 2015 17:09:20 MEZ, schrieb Andreas Meyer <a.meyer@nimmini.de>:

...

Hello!

I want to have dovecot log into a separate file and set log_path = /var/log/dovecot instead of log_path = syslog

Dovecot does not start if I do this. Tried to change permissions and overschip of the file, no luck, ha. Deleted it in the hope dovecot creates it but no.

If I set log_path = syslog dovecot starts and I see it is running as

ps aux |grep dove

root 2429 0.2 0.0 3416 2568 ? Ss 16:42 0:00 /usr/sbin/dovecot -F dovecot 2431 0.0 0.0 3100 2080 ? S 16:42 0:00 dovecot/anvil root 2432 0.0 0.0 3228 2316 ? S 16:42 0:00 dovecot/log root 2434 0.0 0.0 4220 3300 ? S 16:42 0:00 dovecot/config

What must be done to have dovecot log into the specified file?

Greetings

Andreas Is the user dovecot is running as allowed to write to that file?

You could configure your syslog daemon to write all dovecot logging to a different file and don't write it to standard syslog file.

Regards Christian