Perhaps "logrotate" can help you here. >From the manpage:
logrotate is designed to ease administration of systems that generate large numbers of log files. It allows automatic rotation, compression, removal, and mailing of log files. Each log file may be handled daily, weekly, monthly, or when it grows too large. - Chan Kok Leong John McKown <joa...@swbell.net> Sent by: Linux on 390 Port <LINUX-390@VM.MARIST.EDU> 01/07/2009 05:50 AM Please respond to Linux on 390 Port <LINUX-390@VM.MARIST.EDU> To LINUX-390@VM.MARIST.EDU cc Subject bash shell question I've got a small problem. I have a daemon which I cannot easily restart because it is production and people are using it. The daemon is started with something like: daemon args >>daemon.log The file "daemon.log" is getting very huge. The correct way to fix this is to stop the daemon, "mv" or "rm" the "daemon.log", then restart the daemon. But I have a vague memory that it is sometimes possible to "reset" a file to "empty" simply by doing a: >daemon.log and that will, at times, work even if the daemon is not restarted. Is my memory correct? Or is that some sort of "special case" which does not apply when bash does a >> redirect of stdin? We plan to fix this by "not doing that!", but instead piping the stdout from the daemon to a process called "cronolog" which works by automatically changing the output file at midnight by changing the "date portion" of the log name. -- Q: What do theoretical physicists drink beer from? A: Ein Stein. Maranatha! John McKown ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@vm.marist.edu with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@vm.marist.edu with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
