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Asked: 2017-08-25 00:13:21 +0800 CST

How to cleanup tomcat server logfiles with crontab (permissions restricted)

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I have a tomcat server that generates access logfiles on a daily rotation.

To clean them up every X days, I tried configuring the following crontab -e:

@weekly find /var/log/tomcat8/localhost_access_log.*.txt -mtime +10 -delete

Problem: I'm getting a Permission denied error running this. Because the /var/log/tomcat8 folder has tomcat:tomcat user:group permissions, and I'm logged in as a different one.

So, how could I best create a cronjob that has permissions to delete those files?

Or should I just add the crontab via sudo crontab -e?

server

2 Answers

  1. You could fix that using sudo crontab -e, since root will have sufficient permissions.

    But logrotate seems to be the tool to rotate logs (and is most likely already in use in your system).

    Have a look in /etc/logrotate.d/ and try to find if tomcat already uses it.

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  2. Best Answer

    In order to run crontab which can access files owned by user tomcat you can execute the command as user tomcat

    Run crontab as user tomcat using:

    sudo crontab -u tomcat -e
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