How to View System Logs With journalctl in Linux

journalctl reads and displays logs collected by systemd's journal, covering both system events and service output.

Key points

• journalctl -u nginx shows logs only for a specific systemd service
• journalctl -f follows the log in real time, similar to tail -f
• journalctl --since "1 hour ago" filters logs to a specific time window

Example

journalctl -u nginx -f