Why is syslog not logging where I tell it to log?

I can confirm the following worked on my Mac running 10.6.7:

I added the following line to /etc/syslog.conf (where <tab> is a tab character):

*.debug<tab>/var/log/messages

I HUP'd the syslogd process using sudo kill -HUP <syslogd pid>.

And tested it with logger -p debug test_msg and syslog -s hello.

syslog created /var/log/messages on the fly as I used the logger and syslog commands.

The man page for syslog.conf(5) specifies the use of tabs between the fields. However, I tried using a single space instead and that worked as well. Based on the man pages for syslog and syslogd, /etc/syslog.conf appears to be the only configuration file you need to worry about.

Thanks. After using vi to create the file instead of a python script, I noticed that it was logging as expected. I did a diff of the files and noticed one had a newline while the other did not. Apple must remove the last character of the file expecting it to be a newline, which is why without the newline it logged to /var/log/message instead of /var/log/messages. I have fixed the python script. Your note about the tab made me try the diff on the file, so thanks!