If you are writing a shell script and want any messages to appear in the system logger you can just use the logger command to do this.

Here is an example on my Slackware system:

$ logger -t TEST "This is a test message" $ cat /var/log/messages cat: /var/log/messages: Permission denied $ su - Password: # cat /var/log/messages Aug 23 17:44:47 slackbook TEST: This is a test message