My proudest moment

Hark ye, monks, particuarly ye sysadmin type monks.

I recently had a perl epiphany that I wish to shout from the mountain tops. It is simple and it is powerful. If you are a sysadmin, as I am, this is a wonderful thing.

$SIG{__DIE__} = sub { syslog("err", shift) };
[download]

This puts the "die" message into syslog. No more do you have to pepper your script with syslog calls next to each die, only to have your script actually die for some reason you either forgot to syslog or didn't manually die from.

Rejoice!

--Pileofrogs

Update:

Yes, use openlog. I just left it out to keep my example super short. Besides, the point is using $SIG{__DIE__} to call your logging routines, whatever they are.

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Re: My proudest moment by ikegami (Patriarch) on Oct 29, 2007 at 16:24 UTC
That would `syslog` caught exceptions. See `$^S`. `if (!eval { ...; 1 }) { ... }` [download] That wouldn't catch compile errors (although that's easily fixed using `BEGIN`). `use strict; $SIG{__DIE__} = sub { syslog("err", shift) }; for my $counter (1..10) { print("$conter\n"); }` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: My proudest moment by grinder (Bishop) on Oct 29, 2007 at 17:20 UTC
Second rule of Sys::Syslog: do NOT use `syslog` before calling `openlog`. (Damn. Can't find Sébastien's notes from YAPC::Europe... link, anyone?) • another intruder with the mooring in the heart of the Perl	[reply]
Re^2: My proudest moment by naikonta (Curate) on Oct 29, 2007 at 18:29 UTC
Well, "do NOT use `syslog` before calling `openlog`" is quite different from "You should use `openlog()` before calling `syslog()`", at least to me :-) Open source softwares? Share and enjoy. Make profit from them if you can. Yet, share and enjoy!	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: My proudest moment (...::Syslog::Carp) by tye (Sage) on Oct 29, 2007 at 19:45 UTC
Given some of the replies, it sounds like this would be worth putting into a module: Foo::Syslog::Carp where "Foo" is replaced by the proper top-level module category, probably one of qw( Logger Net Sys Unix Log ), based on what searching for syslog finds. - tye	[reply]
Re: My proudest moment by tfrayner (Curate) on Oct 30, 2007 at 18:08 UTC
I have for a couple of years now enhanced my local reputation for omniscience by using a `$SIG{__DIE__}` handler that sends me an email every time some part of my code dies (using MIME::Lite). I'd definitely recommend the approach for long-running, unsupervised, but production-critical daemon-style applications. Tim	[reply] [d/l]
Re: My proudest moment by Dominus (Parson) on Nov 05, 2007 at 18:40 UTC
Something similar I often do in CGI programs and other utilities that are not attached to the terminal: `BEGIN { open STDERR, ">", "/tmp/$0-$$.log"; }` [download] and then all die and warn messages go to the log file in /tmp. To get this to work with `Sys::Syslog` you would need a little more machinery: `BEGIN { sub SLH::PRINT { syslog("err", $_[1]) } sub SLH::TIEHANDLE { return bless ["dummy object"] => "SLH" } tie *STDERR => "SLH"; }` [download] And then everything written to STDERR gets passed along to syslog. Disclaimer 1: I didn't actually try this. Disclaimer 2: I never, ever use software written by Eric Allman. -- Mark Dominus Perl Paraphernalia	[reply] [d/l] [select]