Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 2103
RFE: logrotate needs a way to mail recent log, not just oldest
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:37:49 EDT
It would be really nice if logrotate had a way to send mail with the log file that was just rotated, instead of only the one that's about to be removed from the end of the rotation. E.g., I've got a setup where I keep 31 days of logs, rotated daily. I'd like to get mail each night with the previous day's logs, instead of the logs from a month ago. I've chatted with Erik about this via e-mail briefly, and I plan on fetching the source for logrotate and creating and submitting a patch...
I have an initial pass at a patch. It seems to work both with and without compression enabled and with either the 'mailfirst' or 'maillast' option (that's how I chose to mark it -- this could of course be changed). I do notice one problem with it, though, and that is that the mail gets sent before the log file is rotated, which in the case of mailfirst, means that we actually end up mailing the active file. I suspect the whole mail routine should be moved to after the rotation of the main file, and probably even after the postrotate scripts have run, but before the removal of the last file happens. However, I'm going to leave that for someone else to do (maybe I'll do it some day in the future), as I'm not real familiar with this code, and I don't want to take the time right now to figure out the intracacies of any inter-dependancies that might exist in order-of-execution of these various commands. While I was at it, I fixed a typo in the man page (that was referenced in semi-related bug #1932 Here are the patches: http://www.daveltd.com/src/hacks/logrotate.mailfirst.diff Note that the above also includes changes to remove end-of-line whitespace (a pet peeve of mine). If you want the diffs without that, they are available too, here: http://www.daveltd.com/src/hacks/logrotate.mailfirst.diff-w
Oh, I forgot to mention, the changes that I made were against the code that I found as 'logrotate-2.5.tar.gz' in the ftp archive.