rotatelogs

Section: Maintenance Commands (8)
Updated: March 2001
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NAME

rotatelogs - rotate Apache logs without having to kill the server

SYNOPSIS

rotatelogs logfile rotationtime [offset]

DESCRIPTION

rotatelogs is a simple program for use in conjunction with Apache's piped logfile feature which can be used like this:

TransferLog "| rotatelogs /path/to/logs/access.log 86400"

This creates the files /path/to/logs/access.log.nnnn where nnnn is the system time at which the log nominally starts (this time will always be a multiple of the rotation time, so you can synchronize cron scripts with it). At the end of each rotation time (here after 24 hours) a new log is started.

OPTIONS

logfile: The path plus basename of the logfile. If logfile includes any % characters, it is treated as a format string for strftime(3). Otherwise, the suffix .nnnn is automatically added and is the time at which the logfile was created.
rotationtime: The rotation time in seconds.
offset: The number of minutes offset from UTC. If omitted, zero is assumed and UTC is used. For example, to use local time in the zone UTC -5 hours, specify a value of -300 for this argument.