2013/7/15 Lennart Poettering mzerqung@0pointer.de
[...]
Well, assuming that bash is entirely in memory. And also, note that
neither cat, nor cp, nor tail are actually bash builtins and will not work. It's pretty hard (though certainly possible) viewing files with just bash builtins.
echo $(< /var/log/messages)
[...]
Note that we do include journalctl on all our livecds. Also, most distributions do include it in some way or another, and you do not need to boot systemd to use to it access your journal files.
There are more Live-CDs in the wild without journalctl than Live-CDs with journalctl.
Regards, Thomas