Quite a few of you contact me because you’ve downloaded either of my free log browsers, Ulbow and Consolation 3, and can’t get them to work. The commonest problem reported is that nothing appears in the view of log entries when you’ve clicked on the button to get a log extract. In some cases, this is because the logs have a defect or simply don’t exist in the first place.

This new beta-release of Ulbow tackles such problems with a new Check Log command. This opens a diagnostic window, in which you click the Check Active Log button. Ulbow then examines the folders in which the log files should be stored, and reports back how many of them it finds, and how many items each contains. It then runs a basic log show command which should return a few hundred log entries, and reports whether that completes without error.

On a normal Mojave or Catalina system, you should see a report containing something like:
Check of log files at /var/db/diagnostics:
There are 10 items in that path.
There are 52 files in the Persist folder.
There are 197 files in the Special folder.
There are 169 files in the Signpost folder.
There are 8 files in the timesync folder.
There are 257 folders in the /var/db/uuidtext folder.

log show --last 2 command returned 238 log entries.
The log show command appears to be working correctly.

Earlier versions of macOS don’t normally have a Signpost folder, as those versions of the unified log don’t support that feature. Otherwise, the absence of any of those folders indicates that the log system on that Mac isn’t functioning properly, and you may not be able to retrieve log entries.

The solution to this normally involves installing the latest Combo updater for that version of macOS, or, if that doesn’t fix it, performing a re-install of macOS.

Ulbow version 1.1b2 is now available from here: ulbow11b2
from Downloads above, from its Product Page, and through its auto-update feature.

My next work on this new version of Ulbow will be to make its chart views savable, and to provide a means of copying a time period from a chart view and pasting it into the date section of the main document window. When those have been added and any bugs fixed, I intend to proceed to a release version. If there are any other features you wish, or bugs which I need to fix, then please let me know soonest.