#40053·systemd

journalctl randomly fails to read the main journal file

Author: yuwataCreated Dec 10, 2025Updated Sep 15, 2026
Labelsbug 🐛journal

If journal file rotation occurs during journalctl invocation, we hit something like the following, and we cannot read the newly archived journal file and/or the new main journal file.

Journal file /var/log/journal/748efedc39f24d60dee8bee36937d73f/system.journal is truncated, ignoring file.

This should be caused by the optimization done by bd1af1d5fb1db9a77e8738ec108bf60ff0cb15f1.

To workaround the issue, nowadays we insert bunch of journalctl --sync and/or --rotate in our integration tests, but that should be gracefully handled by sd-journal side.