Follow-up question: Why my log is not showing tor_notices.log and tor_traces.log?

Question

I asked "Please Explain the Different Log Types, Specifically Warn and Notice" and saw "How can I set up logging with latest Tor Browser?". I set it the same way in my torrc.

$ grep log /etc/tor/torrc | grep -v "^#"
Log notice file /var/log/tor/tor_notices.log
Log trace file /var/log/tor/tor_traces.log

Now either there is something with the way I structured it or something else. After doing this, I restarted the system (guessing that the daemon would restart) and went to /var/log/tor hoping to find the two new logs that I have told about in my /etc/tor/torrc but wasn't able to find them :(

/var/log/tor# ls
log  log.1  log.2.gz  log.3.gz  log.4.gz  log.5.gz

Can somebody explain what I am doing wrong?

Answer 1

I'll summarize the discussion from the comments and the chat here:

1. The original poster had a system-wide installation of Tor in their Debian system and furthermore installed a Tor Browser.
2. The system-wide torrc which lives in /etc/tor is different from the one which Tor Browser uses. The configuration from the Tor Browser usually lives inside its installation directory.
3. The OP edited the file /etc/tor/torrc, but started the Tor Browser. So the changes had no effect here, because the Tor Browser doesn't look into this file.
4. When the OP changed the configuration from Tor Browser it replied with an error message (see below).
5. This was because there is no severity level called trace.

Error message after editing the right file:

23 02:42:59.150 [notice] Read configuration file "/home/XXX/.local/share/torbrowser/tbb/x86_64/tor-browser_en-US/Data/Tor/torrc".
Sep 23 02:42:59.153 [warn] Couldn't parse log levels in Log option 'Log trace file ~/torlogs/trace.log'
Sep 23 02:42:59.153 [warn] Failed to parse/validate config: Failed to validate Log options. See logs for details.
Sep 23 02:42:59.153 [err] Reading config failed--see warnings above.

So to get rid of this error it was important to edit the right file and to use configuration variables which are documented.