I am trying to write a simple script that monitors /var/log/messages file. The file by default doesn't have read permission for users, when I allow read access to this file my script works perfectly, but the problem is that file gets rewritten each time I restart the system and all my changes get lost. Is there a way to change its default permissions?
Thanks.
Best Answer
There are permissions management setups that don't require you to use
sudo-- you could give the user running the script access to the group that owns/var/log/messages(adm, on my laptop here). Alternately, useNOPASSWDin the sudoers entry for the script, so that you don't have to store a password in the script.If you're really dead-set on letting the world see what's in
/var/log/messages(and I'd strongly recommend against it -- there really can be private stuff in there) then what's setting your permissions back to default is probablylogrotate, so check out your logrotate config and find the stanza that's doing your/var/log/messagesrotation and change it.