Xcode and other tools can be used to view logs on iOS devices. One of those other tools is libimobiledevice. I usually install libimobiledevice using homebrew, as there are a few dependencies that can be a little annoying. To install homebrew if you haven’t already, run the following command:
ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
Once run, follow the prompts to complete the installation. Once homebrew is installed, run the following brew command to download the required components and then libimobiledevice:
brew install -v --devel --fresh automake autoconf libtool wget libimobiledevice
Then run ideviceinstaller:
brew install -v --HEAD --fresh --build-from-source ideviceinstaller
Once these are installed, you can plug in a paired device, unlock it and use the following command to view the logs on the screen:
idevicesyslog
This is akin to running a tail against the device. Again, the device must be paired. You can use the command line (e.g. if you’re running this on Linux) to view the logs, but if you’re not paired you’ll need to use idevicepair to pair your device, followed by the pair verb (which is very different from the pear verb):
idevicepair pair
You can also unpair using the unpair verb:
idevicepair unpair
When pairing and unpairing, you should see the appropriate entries in /var/db/lockdown. The final option I’m going to cover in this article is the date (very useful when scripting unit tests using this suite. To obtain this, use the idevicedate command, no operators or verbs required:
idevicedate