Cron and log files

I’ve upgraded from Raspbmc to OSMC and I’m trying to set up some of the other bits & bobs that the pi used to do for me. I’m trying to set up cron to do a nightly copy of files, however I can’t get the cronjob to run. In trying to diagnose what the problem is, I went to the /var/logs directory to see if I could find something, but when I try to run less, cat, tail etc to look at the log files I get this error:

may be a binary file. See it anyway?

Even if I look at the files they appear to be binary. Any idea what’s going on here, and also what file should I be looking in for output from cron? I assumed syslog but that file is not present.

OSMC uses systemd. Systemd replaces syslog with journalctl:

http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/journalctl.html

The log files are stored in a database format (hence the binary file) and can be accessed using

sudo journalctl

There are many different command line options documented above to filter and control the output.