> Why is it in /var/cron/log and not /var/log/cron by default? To me it > makes more sense to have it all in /var/log/, but given it has been the > default for several years, is there a reason (other than historic) that > the default is like that?
That dates back to more than 20 years actually. Back in the CSRG days, a lot of new daemon imports got their own /var directories for reasons we can only guess at. > Is there any harm or issue with setting the log location > of cron logs to /var/log/cron instead, or is it best to leave it > in /var/cron/log? You can do whatever you want. Before we talk about changing this, we must know what the downsides are. > I am interested to know as I keep /var/log in a separate UFS partition > mounted with rw,softdep,noatime,nodev,noexec,nosuid to store all the > syslog logs, and /var/cron/log is the odd one out here. With softdep??? That is completely insane. So clearly you don't actually care to have the contents of logs after a crash -- since softdep is quite likely to lose data buffers during circumstances like memory pressure, etc etc. That's the kind of comment that leads me to take bug reports less seriously in the future... diagnostic logs which would have solved the problem, will have been lost INTENTIONALLY. And then we get asked for help? Crazy.
