I not sure to well understand your question.
As you talk about edit logs, I suppose that you are using non HA namenode.
1) Edits logs are save in : (dfs.namenode.name.dir)/current vers dfs.namenode.name.dir is set in hdfs-site.xml.
They look like edits_000XXXXX-000YYYYY (where X and Y are a checkpoint number)
2) if you want to read an edit log, you have to convert it to a readable format :
* copy an edit file some (/tmp for instance)
* execute this command vi the hdfs user : $ hdfs oev -p XML -i ./edits_000XXXXX-000YYYYY -o ./readable_edit.xml
Regards…