Logging Messages with Growl

[bagheera101]

Hello! I have a feeling I know the answer to this already, but I'd like to know if it's possible to view past Growl notifications (specifically notifications set for Adium), or enable logging for the future.

In the forums, I found reference to typing this in Terminal: "defaults write com.Growl.GrowlHelperApp GrowlLoggingEnabled -int 1", so I did so. Where does this log file save to? Or does this no longer work at all?

Thanks very much for any help!

[boredzo]

In the forums, I found reference to typing this in Terminal: "defaults write com.Growl.GrowlHelperApp GrowlLoggingEnabled -int 1", so I did so.

There are some other prefs you need to set for that to work.

Where does this log file save to?

That's one of them.

Or does this no longer work at all?

Still works fine.

The hidden prefs controlling logging are:

• "GrowlLoggingEnabled" = true/false (best to use -bool YES/NO instead of -int)
• "GrowlLogType" = 1 (the alternative is Console logging; I forgot what the value for that is, but it's probably 0)
• "Custom log history 1" = path to your log file of choice (ideally not being used by anything else)

The reason for the weird name of the last one is that there's a sequence of at least three. They used to be the content of a pop-up menu. The first item is the selected one—the path Growl actually logs to.

To turn off logging, either delete the GrowlLoggingEnabled key or set its value to false. You can also delete the other two keys, if you don't mind typing in the pathname again if you ever want to turn logging back in, but leaving them in place is harmless.

BTW: If you use a lot of apps that support Growl, that log file will grow quickly (even if you have most of the notifications turned off). Remember to throw it out every few months.

[davek]

Hi boredzo,
Thanks for your post. I can't figure out the third defaults write. Can you please spell out exactly what I'm supposed to type? Thanks.

[boredzo]

Can you please spell out exactly what I'm supposed to type?

No, because I don't know where the path you want to log to is.

This is most of it:

defaults write "Custom log history 1" -string LOG_PATH_HERE

Replace LOG_PATH_HERE with the absolute path to the file you want to log to.

[dkk]

Hi boredzo,

Thanks; that's what I was looking for. I was missing the quotation marks.