In message <28698.961079688@mundamutti.cs.mu.OZ.AU>, Robert Elz writes:
>That said, dmesg.boot belongs in /var/log anyway, there's no rational at
>all for it in /var/run

FWIW, BSD/OS has it in /var/db, which I think is also fairly plausible.

>do_dmesg()
>{
>	mv /var/log/dmesg.boot /var/log/dmesg.boot-
>	dmesg $dmesg_flags > /var/log/dmesg.boot
>	(echo -n "Booted at: "; date) >> /var/log/dmesg.history
>	cat /var/log/dmesg.boot >> /var/log/dmesg.history
>}

>or something like that.   (and perhaps just /var/log/dmesg rather than
>/var/log.dmesg.boot - the ".boot" doesn't add any useful information).

I think it does add useful information; naive users may not know when it
was created, and may assume that it's magically current, since some of
the other files in /var/log are.  :)  It's also consistent with the
normal state of the system, and friendly to people who want to send
current output and the boot-time output as attachments to the same email.

:)

-s