a bug with tomcat5.5 on debian

["Martin Paraskevov" <martin@cs.umd.edu>]

I installed tomcat5.5 on my Debian box (using apt-get)
but when I tried starting tomcat by running

/etc/init.d/tomcat5.5 start

it would just print:

Starting Tomcat servlet engine: tomcat5.5.

but Tomcat won't start. After reading tons of documentation
I was able to start Tomcat in the most weird (and lucky)
way. I was examining /var/lib/tomcat5.5/logs/catalina.out
which is where the standard output goes.
I wasn't actually able to open catalina.out by just running

less catalina.out

I had to run

less -f catalina.out

When I listed catalina.out I got:

prw------- 1 tomcat55 nogroup 0 2007-01-03 01:18 catalina.out

I really don't know what the first p in the permissions means,
please explain.

After I forced reading catalina.out with less -f the terminal
would just hang at which point I had to Ctrl-C it after which
the normal less interface would resume and after exiting,
surprise, Tomcat is running.

I am able to reproduce this every time and it looks to me
it is a bug in the Tomcat logging. Is it related to the fact
that catalina.out does not rotate? I just read somewhere
that catalina.out does not rotate, but I don't know what it
means. Could you please explain rotation?

Regards,
Martin