newsyslog naming scheme could be improved?

[Matthew Seaman]

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Walt Pawley wrote:
| At 9:33 AM -0700 10/11/08, Kelly Jones wrote:
|> newsyslog rotates logfiles so that messages.0.gz is yesterday's file,
|> messages.1.gz is the day before's, etc.
|>
|> This is ugly.
| 
| IMHO, this is worse than merely ugly. I gave up "rotating" log
| files a long time ago when I kept running into problems that
| needed extensive time periods worth of log data with which to
| resolve issues. I use some modifications to the periodic
| scripts to do the log data archiving with time related names.
| 
| Of course, if you're generating megabytes of compressed log
| data every day, this is likely impractical but it works well
| for systems I normally use.

I note that syslog.conf allows you to pipe log messages into some other
application.  Simply using cronolog (or rotatelogs from one of the Apache
ports) would allow you to create date-stamped logfile names pretty easily.

Eg.

*.*                                             |/usr/local/sbin/cronolog /var/log/all-%Y-%m-%d.log

This doesn't provide control of file permissions or compression of old log
files, but either of those are relatively simple to fix.

	Cheers,

	Matthew

- -- 
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.                       Flat 3
~                                                      7 Priory Courtyard
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey         Ramsgate
~                                                      Kent, CT11 9PW, UK
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