Generating Syslog messages from Tclsh

Articles » Tclsh on Cisco IOS Tutorial » Generating Syslog messages from Tclsh

Tcl policies run within the Embedded Event Manager (EEM) environment can use the action_syslog command to generate logging messages. Other Tcl environments within Cisco IOS (for example, tclsh) do not provide a syslog message API to Tcl scripts. You can use the syslog: opaque write-only file system introduced in IOS release 12.4T in these environments to generate debugging syslog messages from the Tcl script.

The messages written to the syslog: file system have the LOG_DEBUG priority. The priority of these messages cannot be changed.

The ability to generate logging messages from a tclsh script allows you to separate the script output from the debugging stream. For example, you could open two Telnet sessions to the router, execute the script in one telnet session and monitor the debugging printouts in the second telnet session with the terminal monitor command. You can also use this approach to generate debugging messages from other Tcl-based subsystems (for example, Embedded Menu Manager or Embedded Syslog Manager).

To generate debugging messages from a Tcl script, use the following sequence:

set syslog [open "syslog: " w+]
puts $syslog "message"
close $syslog

If you want to generate numerous debugging messages from the same script, you could use the flush $syslog statement after each puts statement and close the $syslog channel identifier at the end of the script.

Sample Tclsh script

The following tclsh script generates two debugging messages, one before it starts a ping command, the second one after the ping command has executed.

Sample syslog script
set syslog [open "syslog:" w+]
puts $syslog "%PING-6-starting ping"
flush $syslog
exec "ping 10.0.0.2"
puts $syslog "%PING-6-finished"
close $syslog

The router on which the script is executed has been configured to generate date/time timestamps for regular syslog messages and uptime timestamps for debugging messages:

Timestamp configuration
service timestamps debug uptime
service timestamps log datetime msec

When the script is executed, it generates two messages with uptime timestamps (proving that the syslog: file system results in debugging syslog messages). The second message appears after the router prompt, proving that it was indeed a syslog message and not a regular write to the TTY.

Router#tclsh syslog.tcl
00:19:30: %PING-6-starting ping
Router#
00:19:40: %PING-6-finished
This article written by Ivan Pepelnjak in 2007 was originally published on CT3 wiki which became unreachable in early 2019. The text was retrieved from an Internet Archive snapshot and republished on ipSpace.net
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