Mailing List Archive

rotatelogs tweak?
I've had a few recent offline questions about rotatelogs that
surprisingly hit this same limitation I hadn't seen before.

Currently, without a post-rotate program, you can't have a different
behavior for truncation of the initial log file and rotated log files.
Either both are truncated or neither are.

This means a config like error_log.%d (day of month) is not really
usable, because you will either lose data during a restart or end up
with January 1 and Feb 1 in the same file.

Is it reasonable to add a -T for "truncate all but the initial file"
or is this too confusing for its value?

This would allow e.g. bin/rotatelogs -T error_log.%d ... which gives
you a nice sliding month long window that doesn't require external
cleanup -- it's an example I'd like to add. Same for day of week --
you don't want logs from all Tuesdays, but when you restart, you don't
want to truncate.

This would also replace some of the "misuse" of the confusing -n I
added that is very prickly to make intuitive without -t.

--
Eric Covener
covener@gmail.com