In Linux every activity is monitored and logged in to their respective logs in /var/log folder. The depth of log information is dependent on the log configuration we did it in /etc/logrotate.d and we have to rotate them all the time to control how much space they use. When ever we install packages, the package copies it’s log configuration file to /etc/logrotate.d folder so that that specific application log files can be rotated.

Normally in any Linux/Unix machine logs are rotated daily(/etc/cron.daily/) or weekly(/etc/cron.weekly) or monthly(/etc/cron.monthly) depending where we kept our logrotate script. My logrotate script is located in /etc/cron.daily which indicate my logs are rotated daily. One more facter logrotate depends when rotatting logs is log “status” file which is located at /var/lib/logrotate/status which stores when we rotated logs last time.

Let us see how we can rotate logs manually instead of waiting for hours.

Example1: In order to check what happens when we rotate log files manually before actually executing them can be done in debug mode(-d).

logrotate -d log-config-file

Example output:

root@linuxnix:/# logrotate -d libvirtd
reading config file libvirtd

Handling 1 logs

rotating pattern: /var/log/libvirt/libvirtd.log  weekly (4 rotations)
empty log files are rotated, only log files >= 102400 bytes are rotated, old logs are removed
considering log /var/log/libvirt/libvirtd.log
  log does not need rotating

Actually this will not rotate any logs, if you want to rotate logs manually we have use force on it.

Example2: Rotate logs for a specific application, for example here I taken my libvirt application logs

logrotate -f log-config-file

My libvirt folder size before log rotating them.

du -hs /var/log/libvirt/
216K    /var/log/libvirt/

Example:

logrotate -f /etc/logrotate.d/libvirtd

After executing above command my libvirt log folder size is

root@linuxnix:/# du -hs /var/log/libvirt/
172K    /var/log/libvirt/

Example3: How about rotating all the logs in your machine which keep their log configurations in /etc/logrotate.d folder

logrotate -f /etc/logrotate.conf

My /var/log folder size before execution is 15MB

Example:
root@linuxnix:/# du -hs /var/log/
15M    /var/log/
root@linuxnix:/# logrotate -f /etc/logrotate.conf

My /var/log folder size is reduced to 13MB after this command execution

Output:

root@linuxnix:/# du -hs /var/log/
13M    /var/log/

Example4: With -f option we can not see what is happening background, if we want to see we can use verbose mode with -v.

logrotate -vf /etc/logrotate.conf

Clipped output:

reading config file /etc/logrotate.conf
including /etc/logrotate.d
reading config file apache2
reading config file apport
reading config file apt
reading config file consolekit
reading config file cups-daemon
reading config file dpkg
reading config file glusterfs-common
reading config file libvirtd
reading config file libvirtd.lxc
reading config file libvirtd.qemu
reading config file libvirtd.uml
reading config file pm-utils
reading config file ppp
reading config file rsyslog
reading config file speech-dispatcher
reading config file ufw
reading config file unattended-upgrades
reading config file upstart

Handling 24 logs

rotating pattern: /var/log/apache2/*.log  forced from command line (14 rotations)
empty log files are not rotated, old logs are removed
switching euid to 0 and egid to 103
considering log /var/log/apache2/access.log
  log does not need rotating
considering log /var/log/apache2/error.log
  log needs rotating
considering log /var/log/apache2/other_vhosts_access.log
  log does not need rotating
rotating log /var/log/apache2/error.log, log->rotateCount is 14
dateext suffix '-20150820'
glob pattern '-[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]'
compressing log with: /bin/gzip
switching uid to 0 and gid to 103

Hope this helps some one to logrotate their log files manually

 

 

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Mr Surendra Anne is from Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh, India. He is a Linux/Open source supporter who believes in Hard work, A down to earth person, Likes to share knowledge with others, Loves dogs, Likes photography. He works as Devops Engineer with Taggle systems, an IOT automatic water metering company, Sydney . You can contact him at surendra (@) linuxnix dot com.