You can navigate using the arrow keys, the Page Up/Page Down keys, and the space bar. Journalctl splits the results into pages, similar to the less command in Linux. The entries will start with a banner similar to this which shows the time span covered by the log. When run without any parameters, the following command will show all journal entries, which can be fairly long: $ journalctl To get a full listing of journalctl options, visit the journalctl man page.

These methods can be used on their own or in combination with other commands to refine your search. In the following paragraphs, we’ll show you several ways of using journalctl to retrieve, format, and analyze your logs. Since journald stores log data in a binary format instead of a plaintext format, journalctl is the standard way of reading log messages processed by journald. Journalctl is a utility for querying and displaying logs from journald, systemd’s logging service.