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Questions[logrotate](server)

Martin Hope
cat pants
Asked: 2012-05-23 09:54:02 +0800 CST
  • 56

If a logrotate config is specified with "size" and "daily" parameters, which one takes precedence? Where is this documented? I would like these rotations to occur as a boolean OR operation, ie, if the logs are a day old they get rotated, OR if they are larger than a certain size they will also get rotated. However, logrotate is currently only using the "size" directive, and appears to be ignoring the "daily" directive. Logrotate is set up to run every hour. OS is linux, Red Hat and Debian derivatives.

Also, I am specifying "daily" first, then "size" from the start of the file. Not sure if the order matters, but in any case, one has to come first in the config file...

Thanks!

logrotate
Martin Hope
Anand Chitipothu
Asked: 2011-07-21 18:14:53 +0800 CST
  • 49

The man page of logrotate says that:

It can be used when some program cannot be told to close its logfile
and  thus  might  continue writing to the previous log file for some
time.

I'm confused by this. If a program cannot be told to close its logfile, it will continue to write forever, not for sometime. If the compression is postponed to next rotation cycle, the program continues to write to that file even after the next rotation cycle. How is postponing solving the problem?

My understanding is that copytruncate should be used when a program cannot be told to close the logfile. I'm aware that some data written to the logfile gets lost when the copy is in progress.

I was looking at the logrotate file for couchdb, and it had both copytruncate and delaycompress options.

/usr/local/couchdb-1.0.1/var/log/couchdb/*.log {
   weekly
   rotate 10
   copytruncate
   delaycompress
   compress
   notifempty
   missingok
}

It looks like there is no point using delaycompress when copytruncate is already there. What am I missing?

logrotate