[systemd-devel] util-linux logger vs systemd-cat

[Colin Walters]

I found myself in a situation recently where I wanted to log
a message from a shell script that included MESSAGE_ID.  As
far as I can tell there's no utility binary for this.

systemd ships systemd-cat which connects to the journal, but
it doesn't have support for structured logging; it's just a
way to conveniently stream textual output to the journal.  But that's
not useful to me in this context because in current GNOME-OSTree we
already have gdm set up to log the session to the journal; what I want
is the ability to output structured messages.

util-linux has included a tool "logger" for a log time; it wraps syslog;
better, it's more oriented for logging a single message, which is
convenient for shell script as in this case.

It certainly seems like it could make sense to add a command line switch
like --struct=MESSAGE_ID=0ce153587afa4095832d233c17a88001 to logger.

Or is there an existing tool for this I'm missing?  Should systemd-cat
support structured logging?