Re: Is it possible to do this using logrotate?

[Steve McWilliams <stevemc@Radix.Net>]

>Steve McWilliams <stevemc@Radix.Net> writes:
>
>> I wonder if anyone has experience with the logrotate utility and can
>> answer a question about it for me.  After reading the man page discussion
>> about a copytruncate option, it sounded like it was somehow possible
>> to copy off a log file and truncate it to length 0, and allow the
>> logging process to continue unaffected.
>> 
>> After trying this however the behavior I'm seeing is that the log is
>> copied off, and the logging process is able to continue writing to
>> the same file descriptor, but the log is not correctly truncated.
>
>How is it failing exactly?

If I have the following logrotate config file for instance:

/tmp/foo.log {
    rotate 5
    size=1k
    copytruncate
}

I have a process which is appending to this file frequently.  When
the log file has exceeded 1k I manually invoke logrotate.  It copies
/tmp/foo.log to /tmp/foo.log.1 as expected, however the size and 
contents of the original /tmp/foo are unaffected.  The /tmp/foo file
continues to grow in size and is never truncated.  What I expected to 
see according to the documentation was /tmp/foo reset to 0 size and 
grow from there.

>> I realize this isn't strictly speaking a debian question, so I apologize
>> in advance if this isn't the correct forum for this question.
>
>Anyway, debian-mentor is for packaging-related questions, so it would
>be more appropriate to debian-user. So please heed the reply-to.
>
>-- 
>Robbe

I see.  I just tried subscribing to this list but got a bounce for some
reason.  I'll try to post questions like this there in future though.

Thanks,
Steve