The log law of the wall, joining the inner, near-wall mean velocity profile (MVP) in wall-bounded turbulent flows to the outer region, has been a permanent fixture of turbulence research for over hundred years, but there is still no general agreement on the value of the prefactor, the inverse of the Kármán ‘constant’
$\kappa$, or on its universality. The choice diagnostic tool to locate logarithmic parts of the MVP is to look for regions where the indicator function
$\varXi$ (equal to the wall-normal coordinate
$y^+$ times the mean velocity derivative
$\mathrm {d} U^+/\mathrm {d} y^+$) is constant. In pressure-driven flows, however, such as channel and pipe flows,
$\varXi$ is significantly affected by a term proportional to the wall-normal coordinate, of order
$O({Re}_{\tau }^{-1})$ in the inner expansion, but moving up across the overlap to the leading
$O(1)$ in the outer expansion. Here we show that, due to this linear overlap term,
${Re}_{\tau }$ values well beyond
$10^5$ are required to produce one decade of near constant
$\varXi$ in channels and pipes. The problem is resolved by considering the common part of the inner asymptotic expansion carried to
$O({Re}_{\tau }^{-1})$, and the leading order of the outer expansion. This common part contains a superposition of the log law and a linear term
$S_0 \,y^+{Re}_{\tau }^{-1}$, and corresponds to the linear part of
$\varXi$, which, in channel and pipe, is concealed up to
$y^+ \approx 500\unicode{x2013}1000$ by terms of the inner expansion. A new and robust method is devised to simultaneously determine
$\kappa$ and
$S_0$ in pressure-driven flows at currently accessible
${Re}_{\tau }$ values, yielding
$\kappa$ values which are consistent with the
$\kappa$ values deduced from the Reynolds number dependence of centreline velocities. A comparison with the zero-pressure-gradient turbulent boundary layer, further clarifies the issues and improves our understanding.