When you are editing the syslog-ng OSE configuration file, note the following points:

  • The configuration file can contain a maximum of 6665 source / destination / log elements.

  • When writing the names of options and parameters (or other reserved words), the hyphen (-) and underscore (_) characters are equivalent, for example, max-connections(10) and max_connections(10) are both correct.

  • Numbers can be prefixed with + or - to indicate positive or negative values. Numbers beginning with zero (0) or 0x are treated as octal or hexadecimal numbers, respectively.

    Starting with syslog-ng OSE version 3.5, you can use suffixes for kilo-, mega-, and gigabytes. Use the Kb, Mb, or Gb suffixes for the base-10 version, and Kib, Mib, or Gib for the base-2 version. That is, 2MB means 2000000, while 2MiB means 2097152. For example, to set the log-msg-size() option to 2000000 bytes, use log-msg-size(2Mb).

  • You can use commas (,) to separate options or other parameters for readability, syslog-ng OSE completely ignores them. The following declarations are equivalent:

      source s_demo_stream {
      unix-stream("<path-to-socket>" max-connections(10) group(log));
  };
    
  source s_demo_stream {
      unix-stream("<path-to-socket>", max-connections(10), group(log));
  };

  • When enclosing object IDs (for example, the name of a destination) between double-quotes ("mydestination"), the ID can include whitespace as well, for example:

      source "s demo stream" {
      unix-stream("<path-to-socket>" max-connections(10) group(log));
  };
  • For notes on using regular expressions, see Regular expressions.
  • You can use if {}, elif {}, and else {} blocks to configure conditional expressions. For details, see if-else-elif: Conditional expressions.

Updated: