Whilst reading about Heroku’s logging on Adam’s blog I came across logger, a tool available on most unix systems which takes any input on STDIN, and redirects it to syslog with the provided options. I’d never heard of it, so I assume there’s some other people who havn’t either, and are doing as I have in the past and messing around with far more convaluted ways of getting output routed to syslog.

The gist of it is:

echo "This will be logged" | logger -i -p local0.notice -t EXAMPLE

Which results in the following line in /var/log/syslog on my machine:

May 10 11:25:52 imac EXAMPLE[38038]: This will be logged

See man logger for full details.