Shrug. You have a good point... but you're missing big peices of it. Unreadable is a relitive thing. If the logfile is documented as having the first field be timestamp in seconds since Jan 1 1979 23:59:59, then it isn't a problem. If it lists things like 1032155104 16011503 "Creating asdfoij object" -2147221005, that's fine, so long as the documentation tells you that the fields are seconds-since-epoch, PID, filename, freeform error text, and COM error code, and comes with docs for how to look up those fields. (Preferably a program to parse the logfile and give you useful errors.)