[clug] rotating log files

[Alex Satrapa]

On 23/03/2007, at 10:22 , Robert Edwards wrote:

> Can anyone suggest to me why rotating log files would ever be
> considered a "Good Idea"?

The main reason is to prevent you having to parse through a 16GB file  
to find the log entry you're looking for, is my guess.

But the rotating through ".0" -> ".9" etc never made sense to me. I  
just lived with it because I was too lazy to go fix logrotate to do  
it "the right way".

> To me, a much better approach would be to date-stamp each of the
> log files each day/week/month (configurable) and not to rotate the
> file names.

Aside from rotating the file names, remember each file has a "last  
modified date" which usually indicates the last time something was  
written to that file. "ls -lt" will sort by date, then you pick the  
youngest date older than the events of interest. But you know that  
already, so why am I telling you that? Perhaps I just like the sound  
of my own typing?

> Does such an alternative exist (before we write our own)? What should
> I search for?

Apparently logrotate 3.7.4 and greater support the "dateext" option.  
I only have 3.7 on my machines so I can't tell you more details, but  
it was apparently added to address the exact issue you are  
experiencing (multiple redundant backups of the same log file with  
different names).

Alex