What is ASL server in the comment of asl.h

Question

I am trying to understand how asl.h works, while I am reading asl.h According to http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/Libc/Libc-583/include/asl.h comment of this method.

aslclient asl_open(const char *ident, const char *facility, uint32_t opts);

It is said "Initialize a connection to the ASL server." I am wondering what is ASL server in this case.

Thanks

Answer 1

The first place to look for details on using ASL is the manpage, which you can pull up in Terminal using the command:

man 3 asl

Beyond that, Peter Hosey's Idle Time website has a number of posts detailing how ASL works.

For people wishing to use ASL from a Swift-based API, there's the CleanroomASL open-source project, which also has more details about differences between how ASL works on iOS devices and the Mac.