My system is Debian Wheezy. I have noticed that when I run apt-get, additionally to /var/log/apt/history.log another log file gets created /var/log/apt/term.log. It seems to me that term.log contains the output that was sent to the terminal.
What sense does it make to log this? Is there a way to disable it? I don't want to log useless information.
Best Answer
If you need to figure out what happened during the installation of a package, the information is there.
This file is unlikely to contain any information that would affect your privacy. Maybe some edge cases such as which mirror you downloaded a few files from, which could reveal your broad geographical location. But other system logs have far more detailed information, so this is irrelevant unless you've done a lot of scrubbing already (in which case, just include this file in your scrubbing).
The size of the file is insignificant by today's standards (and even by yesterday's).
The location of the file is determined by the APT settings
Dir::Log(default:/var/log/apt) andDir::Log::Terminal(default:term.log). If you set this option to an empty string in/etc/apt/apt.conf(Dir::Log::Terminal ""), the log file won't be created. But again, that's pointless.