April 30, 2004 DMESG 8

### NAME

dmesg - display the system message buffer

### SYNOPSIS

dmesg [-M core] [-N system]

### DESCRIPTION

dmesg displays the contents of the system message buffer.

The options are as follows:

-M
  Extract values associated with the name list from the specified core instead of the default ``/dev/mem''.

-N
  Extract the name list from the specified system instead of the default ``/netbsd''.

The system message buffer is a circular buffer of a fixed size. If the buffer has been filled, the first line of the dmesg output may not be complete. The size of the message buffer is configurable at compile-time on most systems with the ```MSGBUFSIZE` kernel option. Look for ```MSGBUFSIZE` in options(4) for details.

### FILES

```/var/run/dmesg.boot`
  copy of dmesg at the time of last boot.

### SEE ALSO

options(4), syslogd(8)

### HISTORY

The dmesg command appeared in 4.0BSD.