CCZE(1)

💅 CCZE(1) — the robust log colorizer, bestie edition 🎀

Okay so this is the manual page for the ccze utility — yes, that cute little log colorizer — and it's got its own CCZE(1) manual entry, which is very main character of it. Come sit with me, I'm gonna walk you through the whole thing 💖

---

✨ NAME ✨

ccze — a robust log colorizer. That's the whole vibe. It colors your logs. Robustly. Periodt.

🦋 SYNOPSIS 🦋

ccze [options] <logfile

Yeah bestie, it reads from standard input. Feed it a logfile, get pretty colors back 🌈

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

So this manual page documents, briefly, the ccze utility — which is a drop-in replacement for colorize, but rewritten in C so it's faster and less resource-hungry. The goal was to be fully backwards compatible, yet superior with respect to speed and features. Like, glow-up of the century honestly 👑

💅 OPTIONS 💅

These programs follow the usual GNU command line syntax, with long options starting with two dashes (-). A summary of options is included below. Bloop 🫧

• -a, --argument PLUGIN=ARGUMENTS — use this option to pass ARGUMENTS to the specified PLUGIN. The argument list is whitespace separated. One option, one plugin, no cap.
• -A, --raw-ansi — if one wants to enable raw ANSI color sequences instead of using curses, this option does just that. That's it. That's the whole job ✨
• -c, --color KEY=COLOR — set the color of the keyword KEY to COLOR, like one would do in one of the configuration files. Same energy, command-line edition 🎀
• -C, --convert-date — convert unix timestamp to readable date format (in oops and squid logs, for example). Math→vibes conversion, honestly 💀
• -F, --rcfile rcfile — read rcfile as a configuration file upon startup, instead of the default ones. Your file, your rules 🦋
• -h, --html — instead of colorising the input onto the console, output it in HTML format instead. Blog-post ready 💖
• -l, --list-plugins — list all available (loaded) plugins, along with their type and a short description. It's giving roster reveal 🌟
• -m, --mode mode — change the output mode. Available modes are curses, ansi and html. Pick your fighter 👑
• -o, --options OPTIONS... — CCZE is able to toggle some of its features with this option. You can toggle the scroll, wordcolor, lookups, and transparent features, or you can fiddle with cssfile. All of these are enabled by default, except cssfile. One can turn them off by prefixing the option with a no. Okay so here's the whole rundown, because each one has its own lore:
  • With scroll, one can enable or disable scrolling. If the output is not redirected, it is wise to leave it enabled. Lowkey don't touch this one 🙈
  • The wordcolor option makes ccze search for different keywords in unparsed input, and color those too. Since it is quite fast, and makes the output look better, it is recommended to leave this enabled. Free aesthetic upgrade, bestie 💅
  • However, lookups is an option that might be better to disable. When on, ccze will try to look up usernames, service names, and lots of other stuff, which will slow down coloring a great deal. If one is piping a long log through ccze, this option might be turned off to speed up the process. Big log energy = big slowdown energy 😭
  • With the transparent option, one can make CCZE treat black background colors as transparent — that means, a black background will appear transparent in a similar X terminal. If turned off, it will appear as black. Literally see-through vibes 🧚
  • If cssfile is set, then CCZE will not inline the Cascading Style Sheet information into the outputted HTML, but include a link to the external stylesheet given in this parameter. Separation of concerns, we love to see it 🎀
• -p, --plugin PLUGIN — while the default action is to load all plugins (see the Plugins section below), when this option is present, only the specified plugins will be loaded. If one knows what kind of log will be piped through ccze, using this option may result in a slight speedup. Picky loader = speedy loader ⭐
• -r, --remove-facility — syslog-ng puts the facility level before log messages. With this switch, these can be cut off. Snip snip ✂️
• --help — show summary of options and exit. Help a girl out 🫶
• -V, --version — show version of program. Number drop 🔥

🌈 PLUGINS 🌈

Different programs have different kind of logs, and every kind of log ccze supports is implemented via a plug-in. They are by default located under /usr/lib64/ccze and $HOME/.ccze (so they can be overridden by the user easily). Cute, accessible, overridable 💜

At the moment, the following modules are bundled with the official release:

• apm — for coloring apmd's logs.
• distcc — for coloring distccd's logs. (See distccd(1))
• exim — for coloring exim's main.log. (See exim(8))
• fetchmail — for coloring fetchmail's log files. (See fetchmail(1))
• ftpstats — for coloring ftpStats compatible log files, such as Pure-FTPD's Stats log format.
• httpd — for coloring apache-style access.log and error.log files. (See apache(8))

As a side-effect, all compatible formats, like pure-ftpd(8)'s common-log format is also supported by this plugin. It ate and left no crumbs 🍓

• icecast — for coloring icecast/icecast.log and icecast/usage.log files. (See icecast(8))
• oops — for coloring oops/oops.log files.
• php — for coloring php.log files.
• postfix — for coloring postfix logs. (See postfix(1))
• procmail — for coloring procmail's log file. (See procmail(1))
• proftpd — for coloring proftpd's access.log and auth.log files. (See proftpd(8))
• squid — for coloring squid's access.log, store.log and cache.log files. (See squid(8))
• sulog — for coloring sulog files. (See su(1))
• super — for coloring super.log files. (See super(1))
• syslog — for coloring generic syslog messages. (See syslogd(8))
• ulogd — for coloring ulogd logs.
• vsftpd — for coloring vsftpd.log files. (See vsftpd(8))
• xferlog — for coloring xferlog files. (See xferlog(5))

🎀 FILES 🎀

• /etc/colorizerc, $HOME/.colorizerc — these files are the default configuration files for colorize, and are parsed by ccze for the sake of full compatibility. Legacy support, iconic behavior 💖
• /etc/cczerc, $HOME/.cczerc — this two are the main configuration files, in which one can change the colors used by the program to his liking. See the comments in the beginning of /etc/cczerc for a description on the files' structure. That's where you make it yours ✨

If neither of these files exist on your system, consider using the ccze-dump utility in the source tree, which dumps the default color set to standard output. No config files? No problem, bestie 🫶

🦋 SEE ALSO 🦋

colorize(1) — the origin story, go say hi 💜

👑 AUTHOR 👑

ccze was written by Gergely Nagy <algernon@bonehunter.rulez.org>, based on colorize by Istvan Karaszi <colorize@spam.raszi.hu>. Legends, both of them 🌟

---

And that's the whole page, bestie — this was CCZE 0.2.1, dated 2003-04-24, brought to you by the CCZE manual itself 💅✨🎀🦋 No cap, go color some logs 🌈