Is `watchdog-show string` broken in 7.56?

Question

On a test instance, drush watchdog-show shows, among three other entries, a message starting with "Notice: Undefined property:". However, both of the following commands print nothing at all:

drush watchdog-show "Notice"
drush watchdog-show "Undefined property"

drush watchdog-show ":" does print the message, but also other irrelevant message. So how do I search watchdog messages like it says in the documentation:

drush watchdog-show "cron run succesful" Show a listing of most recent 10 messages containing the string "cron run succesful".

?

Answer 1

No. Or maybe yes - broken for all versions of Drush. The problem is that Drush only searches the message column of the watchdog table, not the variables column too. A watchdog entry is built-up by a message - format string - where a variable can be inserted. If the text you are looking for is in the variable part, Drush won't find it.

Yes, this is very annoying. There is a related Drush bug - see https://github.com/drush-ops/drush/issues/408 Maybe you should comment and ask for re-opening?