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About apt in the /var/log/apt directory appears mostly the history.log and term.log files and their "variations" (old versions) such as:

  • history.log.1.gz ... history.log.11.gz
  • term.log.1.gz ... term.log.11.gz

Question

  • What is the difference/relation between /var/log/apt/history.log and /var/log/apt/term.log?

I saw the content of each one and they are similar.

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1 Answer 1

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history.log shows a terse list of what package actions occurred. This is useful to know what happened when, but lacks troubleshooting detail. The predictable format makes machine-reading the file easy.

term.log records all the terminal output. This is particularly useful for troubleshooting. It's meant to be human-readable, but includes a lot of extra detail that is unnecessary when nothing is wrong.

There is a lot the same information in both -- the difference is in the kind of query you want: "What happened during week X?" vs. "Why did ABC fail?"

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