How to browse logs in /var/log in Console.app on Catalina

While I suspect that this is not what you want to do, you could always do something like schedule a maintenance task to run to limit the size of the file.

Something like this in a shell script that you schedule:

tail -n 10000 /var/log/DiagnosticMessages > /var/log/DiagnosticMessages

Or if you want to keep a history of the contents, something like this:

mv /var/log/DiagnosticMessages /var/log/DiagnosticMessages_$(date +%y%m%d)

If you want to get fancy, you could:

cat /var/log/DiagnosticMessages | wc -l

and then only rename the file if > 10K. As usual it all depends on how much effort you want to put into it, and whether or not you want a history of this file.

And as you said....this doesn't actually resolve the root cause.

No, Console won’t log any of your passwords. It only logs normal process activity like load, errors, warnings, etc.

Certain user activity that can causes a major change in the program’s behaviour will also be logged. Opening and saving documents is one such activity.

Automator logs your password because it doesn’t know you are entering your password; it only knows that keyboard input is being received. Recording actions in Automator is very literal. It records the points being clicked, not the buttons. It records the delay between two actions; it does not detect if a previous action has completed or not. Similarly, it records the buttons being pressed, not what those buttons do or even if the key presses are for a text field or a game.