For example, events logged by Windows and many different Windows apps are more easily viewable in Event Viewer-a tool that lets you search your way and troubleshoot through all kinds of different Windows issues.If you usually keep a known amount of hard-drive space clear, and suddenly find your system running low on space, a problem with the way the system handles log files may be to blame. LOG Files”, and click “OK”.Īlso keep in mind that some operating systems and applications have their own tools for viewing logs they generate.

All you have to do next is choose the program you want to use, select “Always Use This App To Open. Here’s the window that will pop up in Windows (macOS is similar) after you click that.

On both Windows or macOS, just right-click the file and select the “Open With” command for picking the program you want to use. If you prefer that LOG files open with a different program than the current default, you can change it. Your browser will then display everything contained in the file in the new tab. All you have to do is drag and drop the file you want to open into a new tab. If you don’t have a text editor, some web browsers support viewing of log files as well. To start with, if you’ve got any word processing app installed-Microsoft Word, LibreOffice, OpenOffice, Notepad++, and so on-you can open a LOG file with it. You almost certainly have an app already built-in or installed on your system for opening LOG files. By default, Windows will use Notepad to open a LOG file when you double-click on it. How Do I Open One?īecause most log files are recorded in plain text, the use of any text editor will do just fine to open it. txt extension or a different proprietary extension, instead. log file extension, sometimes applications may use the. Basically, whatever the application, server, or OS thinks needs to be recorded. The point of a log file is to keep track of what’s happening behind the scenes and if something should happen within a complex system, you have access to a detailed list of events that took place before the malfunction. Windows keeps all kinds of log files for its various services. For example, your backup program might keep log files showing exactly what happened (or didn’t happen) during a backup. While they can contain a number of things, log files are often used to show all events associated with the system or application that created them. LOG is the file extension for an automatically produced file that contains a record of events from certain software and operating systems.

Get mac system logs