Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook - Second Edition

Logfile management with logrotate

Logfiles are essential components of a Linux system to keep track of events happening on different services on the system. This helps to debug issues as well as provide statistics on the live machine. Management of logfiles is required because as time passes, the size of a logfile gets bigger and bigger. Therefore, we use techniques called rotation such that we limit the size of the logfile and if the logfile reaches a size beyond the limit, it will strip the logfile with that size and store the older entries in the logfile archived in log directories. Hence, older logs can be stored and kept for future references. Let's see how to rotate logs and store them.

Getting ready

logrotate is a command every Linux system ...