Linux – rotate logs with logrotate and move old files

linuxlog-fileslogrotatesyslog

Logrotate don't move file to oldlogs folder and exit abnormally with code 1.
I tried to launch manually it with -d option but no errors are showed.
This is my configuration:

/var/log/myfolder/*.log
{
        rotate 4
        daily
        missingok
        size=100M
        notifempty
        copytruncate
        compress
        delaycompress
        create 640 root root
        dateformat -%Y-%m-%d-%s
        sharedscripts
        postrotate
                mv /var/log/myfolder/*.gz /var/log/myfolder/oldlogs/
                /etc/init.d/rsyslog restart
        endscript
}

Any idea?

I have many files that are updated continuously and I would like to have the compressed files in another directory ( oldlogs) to storage purpose. Rotate command is unnecessary for my purpose but my problem is that I can't move files to oldlogs directory.

Best Answer

You don't need to move the old logs files yourself, log rotate does this for you.

You don't want to restart rsyslog in your postrotate script unless you're rotating logs being written from rsyslog. If that is the case, you don't need to perform a full restart of rsyslog, instead use kill -HUP $(cat /var/run/rsyslogd.pid) (assuming that's the pid of rsyslog).

The goal is to get the service to stop trying to write to the old file handler and start writing to the new log file.

If you're trying to logrotate a log written by another service, -HUP may not be supported.

What's the driver for using copy truncate? That's a bit exotic.

Further details are in the man page for Logrotate https://manpages.debian.org/jessie/logrotate/logrotate.8.en.html

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