DMESG(1) User Commands DMESG(1) NAME dmesg - print or control the kernel ring buffer SYNOPSIS dmesg [options] dmesg --clear dmesg --read-clear [options] dmesg --console-level level dmesg --console-on dmesg --console-off DESCRIPTION dmesg is used to examine or control the kernel ring buffer. The default action is to read all messages from the kernel ring buffer. OPTIONS The --clear, --read-clear, --console-on, --console-off, and --console-level options are mutually exclusive. -C, --clear Clear the ring buffer. -c, --read-clear Clear the ring buffer after first printing its contents. -D, --console-off Disable the printing of messages to the console. -d, --show-delta Display the timestamp and the time delta spent between messages. If used together with --notime then only the time delta without the timestamp is printed. -E, --console-on Enable printing messages to the console. -e, --reltime Display the local time and the delta in human-readable format. -F, --file file Read the messages from the given file. -f, --facility list Restrict output to the given (comma-separated) list of facilities. For example: dmesg --facility=daemon will print messages from system daemons only. For all supported facilities see the --help output. -H, --human Enable human-readable output. See also --color, --reltime and --nopager. -h, --help Display help text and exit. -k, --kernel Print kernel messages. -L, --color[=when] Colorize important messages (enabled by default). The optional argument when can be auto, never or always. If the when argument is omitted, it defaults to auto. -l, --level list Restrict output to the given (comma-separated) list of levels. For example: dmesg --level=err,warn will print error and warning messages only. For all supported levels see the --help output. -n, --console-level level Set the level at which printing of messages is done to the console. The level is a level number or abbreviation of the level name. For all supported levels see the --help output. For example, -n 1 or -n alert prevents all messages, except emergency (panic) messages, from appearing on the console. All levels of messages are still written to /proc/kmsg, so syslogd(8) can still be used to control exactly where kernel messages appear. When the -n option is used, dmesg will not print or clear the kernel ring buffer. -P, --nopager Do not pipe output into a pager. A pager is enabled by default for --human output. -r, --raw Print the raw message buffer, i.e. do not strip the log-level prefixes. Note that the real raw format depends on the method how dmesg(1) reads kernel messages. The /dev/kmsg device uses a different format than syslog(2). For backward compatibility, dmesg(1) returns data always in the sys‐ log(2) format. It is possible to read the real raw data from /dev/kmsg by, for example, the command 'dd if=/dev/kmsg iflag=nonblock'. -S, --syslog Force dmesg to use the syslog(2) kernel interface to read kernel messages. The default is to use /dev/kmsg rather than syslog(2) since kernel 3.5.0. -s, --buffer-size size Use a buffer of size to query the kernel ring buffer. This is 16392 by default. (The default kernel syslog buf‐ fer size was 4096 at first, 8192 since 1.3.54, 16384 since 2.1.113.) If you have set the kernel buffer to be larger than the default, then this option can be used to view the entire buffer. -T, --ctime Print human-readable timestamps. Be aware that the timestamp could be inaccurate! The time source used for the logs is not updated after system SUSPEND/RESUME. -t, --notime Do not print kernel's timestamps. -u, --userspace Print userspace messages. -V, --version Display version information and exit. -w, --follow Wait for new messages. This feature is supported only on systems with a readable /dev/kmsg (since kernel 3.5.0). -x, --decode Decode facility and level (priority) numbers to human-readable prefixes. --time-format format Print timestamps using the given format, which can be ctime, reltime, delta or iso. The first three formats are aliases of the time-format-specific options. The iso format is a dmesg implementation of the ISO-8601 timestamp format. The purpose of this format is to make the comparing of timestamps between two systems, and any other parsing, easy. The definition of the iso timestamp is: YYYY-MM-DDHH:MM:SS,<-+>. The iso format has the same issue as ctime: the time may be inaccurate when a system is suspended and resumed. COLORS Implicit coloring can be disabled by an empty file /etc/terminal-colors.d/dmesg.disable. See terminal-colors.d(5) for more details about colorization configuration. The logical color names supported by dmesg are: subsys The message sub-system prefix (e.g. "ACPI:"). time The message timestamp. alert The text of the message with the alert log priority. crit The text of the message with the critical log priority. err The text of the message with the error log priority. warn The text of the message with the warning log priority. segfault The text of the message that inform about segmentation fault. SEE ALSO syslogd(8) terminal-colors.d(5) AUTHORS Karel Zak ⟨kzak@redhat.com⟩ dmesg was originally written by Theodore Ts'o ⟨tytso@athena.mit.edu⟩ AVAILABILITY The dmesg command is part of the util-linux package and is available from Linux Kernel Archive ⟨ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub /linux/utils/util-linux/⟩. util-linux July 2012 DMESG(1)