Logrotate with the compress option appears to rotate compressed logs as distinct logs. Thus, for example, file.log is rotated to file.log.1, then compressed to file.log.1.gz. In the next pass file.log.1.gz is rotated to file.log.1.gz.1 and compressed to file.log.1.gz.1.gz. All compressed logs are rotated and compressed again at each generation, thus creating a runaway collection of rotated files. My junkbuster log file directory contained 73,000 files when I finally figured out why logrotate ws taking over 12 hours to run.
The Junkbuster logrotate file is: /var/log/junkbuster/* { compress weekly } It appears that the existence of the wildcard is the cause of the problem. The immediate difficulty can be remedied by replacing the wildcard with the base filename. So now this becomes a feature request. Is there a way to specify to logrotate that all base logfiles in a subdirectory are to be rotated without either naming them all or running into this problem of starting rotation sequences for rotated logs? Thanks, and sorry to bother y'all.
Either a tighter glob pattern or using a "olddir" entry will work around this.