Problems with Cron not deleting log files

[David Fleck]

On Tue, 8 Mar 2005, Richard Mcintyre wrote:
> Thank you very much for your sarcastic comment, however, you must have read 
> that far then stopped. The problem is not with the number of extra log files, 
> the problem is that I cannot delete them. AT ALL. As far as 'my home-grown 
> non-working method' of managing my log files, it doesn't exist. In that I had 
> not modified any of the initial settings of /etc/newsyslog.conf or any other 
> conf files. the only commands I ran on the system were the long string of 
> chmod commands I listed.

That seems strange, because the file name format doesn't look anything 
like what newsyslog normally does.  This is what log files look like on my 
5.3-RELEASE-p5 system:

$ ls -lrt /var/log
[snip...]
-rw-r-----  1 root    wheel       728 Mar  5 03:06 sendmail.st.0
-rw-------  1 root    wheel      5959 Mar  5 17:00 cron.1.bz2
-rw-r-----  1 root    wheel       778 Mar  6 00:00 maillog.3.bz2
-rw-r--r--  1 root    wheel     30735 Mar  6 00:00 daemon.3.bz2
-rw-r--r--  1 root    wheel     34760 Mar  6 00:00 all.log.3.bz2
-rw-r--r--  1 root    wheel     49601 Mar  7 00:00 all.log.2.bz2
-rw-r-----  1 root    wheel       645 Mar  7 00:00 maillog.2.bz2
-rw-r--r--  1 root    wheel     46138 Mar  7 00:00 daemon.2.bz2
-rw-r--r--  1 root    wheel     16217 Mar  7 19:45 console.log
-rw-r--r--  1 root    wheel     72179 Mar  7 19:45 messages
-rw-------  1 root    wheel     13227 Mar  7 19:45 auth.log
-rw-r-----  1 root    wheel       642 Mar  8 00:00 maillog.1.bz2
-rw-r--r--  1 root    wheel     31980 Mar  8 00:00 daemon.1.bz2
-rw-r--r--  1 root    wheel     35479 Mar  8 00:00 all.log.1.bz2
-rw-------  1 root    wheel      5453 Mar  8 10:00 cron.0.bz2
-rw-r--r--  1 root    wheel     36777 Mar  9 00:00 daemon.0.bz2
-rw-r--r--  1 root    wheel     41041 Mar  9 00:00 all.log.0.bz2
-rw-r-----  1 root    wheel       644 Mar  9 00:00 maillog.0.bz2
-rw-r-----  1 root    wheel       728 Mar  9 03:06 sendmail.st
-rw-r-----  1 root    wheel      2124 Mar  9 03:06 maillog
-rw-------  1 root    wheel     34519 Mar  9 08:05 cron
-rw-r--r--  1 root    wheel    167201 Mar  9 08:06 all.log

*something's* messing with your log files.  That they're all the same size 
is pretty odd too.  Look around in /var/log/messages or /var/log/cron and 
see if anything looks related.

--
David Fleck
david.fleck at mchsi.com