May 28, 2026 ~ 1 min read

journalctl output


journalctl command has different output formats that are quite useful when parsing for example caddy output logs:

OUTPUT OPTIONS The following options control how journal records are printed:

 -o, --output=
     Controls the formatting of the journal entries that are shown. Takes one of the following options:

     short
     short-full
     short-iso
     short-iso-precise
     short-precise
     short-monotonic
     short-delta
     short-unix
     verbose
     export
     json
     json-pretty
     json-sse
     json-seq
     cat
     with-unit

-o json-pretty is quite nice to use.


Sebastian BolaƱos

Hi, I'm Sebastian. I'm a software developer from Costa Rica. You can follow me on Twitter. I enjoy working on distributed systems.