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Accepted
SamK
Asked: 2012-04-06 05:44:59 +0800 CST

Logrotate does not remove old logs

  • 772

for some reason the old log files are not deleted. Example with apache

What the conf file says:

$ cat /etc/logrotate.d/apache2
/var/log/apache2/*.log {
    weekly
    missingok
    rotate 2
    compress
    delaycompress
    notifempty
    create 640 root adm
    sharedscripts
    postrotate
            /etc/init.d/apache2 reload > /dev/null
    endscript
}

The (cropped) content of the log folder:

# ls /var/log/apache2/
access.log       error.log.26.gz                other_vhosts_access.log.20.gz  access-ssl.log.14.gz
access.log.1     error.log.27.gz                other_vhosts_access.log.21.gz  access-ssl.log.15.gz
access.log.2.gz  error.log.28.gz                other_vhosts_access.log.22.gz  access-ssl.log.16.gz
access.log.3.gz  error.log.2.gz                 other_vhosts_access.log.23.gz  access-ssl.log.17.gz
[...]

Actually there are lots of them:

# ls /var/log/apache2/ | wc -l
85

The logrotate command with --verbose gives me this:

# /usr/sbin/logrotate --verbose  /etc/logrotate.conf
[...]
reading config file apache2
reading config info for /var/log/apache2/*.log
[...]
rotating pattern: /var/log/apache2/*.log  weekly (2 rotations)
empty log files are not rotated, old logs are removed
considering log /var/log/apache2/access.log
  log does not need rotating
considering log /var/log/apache2/error.log
  log does not need rotating
considering log /var/log/apache2/other_vhosts_access.log
  log does not need rotating
considering log /var/log/apache2/pbpdhg-ssl.log
  log does not need rotating
not running postrotate script, since no logs were rotated
[...]

What is wrong here ? The logs are rotated but not removed? What am I missing?

linux logrotate

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    your configuration says: rotate 2

    that means log files are rotated 2 times before being removed, so logrotate only cares about 2 files.

    my guess is that the configuration was changed at some point, because previously more log files were kept, maybe it was something like rotate 28. these older files you have to remove manually.

    • 17

  2. The logs with suffix .gz are not considered because you specified: /var/log/apache2/*.log

    So 2 .log and all .gz files remain.

    To change this put there

    /var/log/apache2/**log* or some regular expression.

    • -3