Friday, April 14, 2017

macOS 10.12.4 Locks Console Log Away From Normal Users

Apple has not apparently documented this anywhere, but it has changed access to Sierra’s new log with the 10.12.4 update. When logged in as a normal – as opposed to admin – user, the entire contents of the logs are now inaccessible.

[…]

Log entries are still made while running with a normal user account logged in, but log show, Console, and Consolation are simply unable to find them. Consequently the only way to examine the log for a period logged in as a normal user is to log in as an admin user again and then examine previous log entries, something which Console cannot do unaided, making it even more unfit for purpose.

[…]

Although not common, apps and macOS can have bugs which only appear when running in normal user mode. This change therefore makes it much harder to use Console to examine such bugs, and much harder to investigate problems which are confined to normal user mode.

Update (2017-04-15): Joseph Chilcote:

Even more strange, log stream still works on standard accounts.

Update (2017-05-03): Howard Oakley:

Some previously-built os_log() calls no longer work properly.

[…]

log collect commands still cannot be limited in size (bug since 10.12).

[…]

Swift calls to write strings using %s in os_log() fail

Bug Console Mac macOS 10.12 Sierra Swift Programming Language