Hi, the emerge.log parser is broken since Perl 5.18.x. /var/log/emerge.log.offset contains two timestamps and the last one has no newline. Later the offset file is concated with /var/log/emerge.log which then ends up in a line with two timestamps not being separated, like: 74685231323806403: Started emerge on: Dec 13, 2011 21:00:03 instead of: 7468523 1323806403: Started emerge on: Dec 13, 2011 21:00:03 This caused an error with Perl 5.18.x because strftime() is more strict now and just not simply ignores such broken lines. That happens in: /usr/share/logwatch/scripts/logfiles/emerge/applydate The actual problem is IMHO in logwatch itself, not the applydate nor the Portage part. Other modules/script just don't throw an error because they handle/parse it somewhat different but they all should get similar broken lines since logwatch concats those files together. IMHO the best solution is: to either add a newline to the offset files and/or write a newline char after printing/piping the offset file. The actual error for emerge/portage is: Usage: POSIX::strftime(fmt, sec, min, hour, mday, mon, year, wday = -1, yday = -1, isdst = -1) at /usr/share/logwatch/scripts/logfiles/emerge/applydate line 69, <STDIN> line 2. system 'cat '/var/cache/logwatch/logwatch.sg2KnV_A/emerge-archive' '/var/log/emerge.log' | /usr/bin/perl5.18.2 /usr/share/logwatch/scripts/logfiles/emerge/applydate>/var/cache/logwatch/logwatch.sg2KnV_A/emerge' failed: 65280 at /usr/sbin/logwatch.pl line 862. Tested with logwatch up to 7.4.0_p170-r1. There is a 7.4.1 release which I haven't tried yet but I doubt it has been fixed there already. But I'll take a look later.