ccze - A robust log colorizer

ccze [options] <logfile

This manual page documents briefly the ccze utility, which is a drop-in replacement for colorize, but written in C, to be faster and less resource-hungry. The goal was to be fully backwards compatible, yet superior with respect to speed and features.

These programs follow the usual GNU command line syntax, with long options starting with two dashes (`-'). A summary of options is included below.

-a, --argument PLUGIN=ARGUMENTS Use this option to pass ARGUMENTS to the specified PLUGIN. The argument list is whitespace separated.

-A, --raw-ansi

If one wants to enable raw ANSI color sequences instead of using curses, this option does just that.

-c, --color KEY=COLOR Set the color of the keyword KEY to COLOR, like one would do in one of the configuration files.

-C, --convert-date

Convert unix timestamp to readable date format (in oops and squid logs, for example).

-F, --rcfile rcfile Read rcfile as a configuration file upon startup, instead of the default ones.

-h, --html

Instead of colorising the input onto the console, output it in HTML format instead.

-l, --list-plugins

List all available (loaded) plugins, along with their type and a short description.

-m, --mode mode Change the output mode. Available modes are curses, ansi and html.

-o, --options OPTIONS... CCZE is able to toggle some of its features with this option. You can toggle the scroll, wordcolor, lookups, and transparent features, or you can fiddle with cssfile. All of these are enabled by default, except cssfile. One can turn them off by prefixing the option with a "no".

With scroll, one can enable or disable scrolling. If the output is not redirected, it is wise to leave it enabled.

The wordcolor option makes ccze search for different keywords in unparsed input, and color those too. Since it is quite fast, and makes the output look better, it is recommended to leave this enabled.

However, lookups is an option that might be better to disable. When on, ccze will try to look up usernames, service names, and lots of other stuff, which will slow down coloring a great deal. If one is piping a long log through ccze, this option might be turned off to speed up the process.

With the transparent option, one can make CCZE treat black background colors as transparent - that means, a black background will appear transparent in a similar X terminal. If turned off, it will appear as black.

If cssfile is set, then CCZE will not inline the Cascading Style Sheet information into the outputted HTML, but include a link to the external stylesheet given in this parameter.

-p, --plugin PLUGIN

While the default action is to load all plugins (see the Plugins section below), when this option is present, only the specified plugins will be loaded. If one knows what kind of log will be piped through ccze, using this option may result in a slight speedup.

-r, --remove-facility

Syslog-ng puts the facility level before log messages. With this switch, these can be cut off.

--help

Show summary of options and exit.

-V, --version

Show version of program.

Different programs have different kind of logs, and every kind of log ccze supports is implemented via a plug-in. They are by default located under /usr/lib/ccze and $HOME/.ccze (so they can be overridden by the user easily).

At the moment, the following modules are bundled with the official release:

apm

For coloring apmd's logs.

distcc

For coloring distccd's logs. (See distccd(1))

exim

For coloring exim's main.log. (See exim(8))

fetchmail

For coloring fetchmail's log files. (See fetchmail(1))

ftpstats

For coloring ftpStats compatible log files, such as Pure-FTPD's Stats log format.

httpd

For coloring apache-style access.log and error.log files. (See apache(8))

As a side-effect, all compatible formats, like pure-ftpd(8)'s common-log format is also supported by this plugin.

icecast

For coloring icecast/icecast.log and icecast/usage.log files. (See icecast(8))

oops

For coloring oops/oops.log files.

php

For coloring php.log files.

postfix

For coloring postfix logs. (See postfix(1))

procmail

For coloring procmail's log file. (See procmail(1))

proftpd

For coloring proftpd's access.log and auth.log files. (See proftpd(8))

squid

For coloring squid's access.log, store.log and cache.log files. (See squid(8))

sulog

For coloring sulog files. (See su(1))

super

For coloring super.log files. (See super(1))

syslog

For coloring generic syslog messages. (See syslogd(8))

ulogd

For coloring ulogd logs.

vsftpd

For coloring vsftpd.log files. (See vsftpd(8))

xferlog

For coloring xferlog files. (See xferlog(5))

/etc/colorizerc, $HOME/.colorizerc

These files are the default configuration files for colorize, and are parsed by ccze for the sake of full compatibility. /etc/cczerc, $HOME/.cczerc This two are the main configuration files, in which one can change the colors used by the program to his liking. See the comments in the beginning of /etc/cczerc for a description on the files' structure.

If neither of these files exist on your system, consider using the ccze-dump utility in the source tree, which dumps the default color set to standard output.

colorize(1)

ccze was written by Gergely Nagy <algernon@bonehunter.rulez.org>, based on colorize by Istvan Karaszi <colorize@spam.raszi.hu>.