Uncontrolled growing of log files may fill up important filesystems like /var. One, not documented features under Linux is logrotate, which belongs to the standard RedHat Linux distribution.Logrotate is designed to ease administration of systems that generate large numbers of log files. It allows automatic rotation, compression, removal, and mailing of log files. Each log file may be handled daily, weekly, monthly, or when it grows too large. Normally, logrotate is run as a daily cron job. It will not modify a log multiple times in one day unless the criterium for that log is based on the log’s size and logrotate is being run multiple times each day, or unless the -f or -force option is used.Any number of config files may be given on the command line. Later config files may override the options given in earlier files, so the order in which the logrotate config files are listed in is important. Normally, a single config file which includes any other config files which are needed should be used.
Configuration File
The configuration file for logrotate can be found in /etc/logrotate.conf# rotate log files daily
daily
# keep 1 day of backlogs
rotate 1
# send errors to
errors martin dot zahn at akadia dot ch
# create new (empty) log files after rotating old ones
create
# uncomment this if you want your log files compressed
compress
# RPM packages drop log rotation information into this directory
include /etc/logrotate.d
# no packages own lastlog or wtmp -- we'll rotate them here
/var/log/wtmp {
monthly
create 0664 root utmp
rotate 1
}Included Files from /etc/logrotate.d (e.g. apache)/var/log/httpd/akadia.log {
missingok
postrotate
/bin/kill -HUP `cat /var/run/httpd.pid 2>/dev/null`
2> /dev/null || true
endscript
}
/var/log/httpd/error.log {
missingok
postrotate
/bin/kill -HUP `cat /var/run/httpd.pid 2>/dev/null`
2> /dev/null || true
endscript
}For more information type the following commands:# man logrotate
# man logrotate | col -b > logrotate.txt
# man -t logrotate > logrotate.ps
