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Bug 6998

Summary:	logrotate compress option creates files exponentially
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Linux	Reporter:	Matthew Saltzman <mjs>
Component:	logrotate	Assignee:	Erik Troan <ewt>
Status:	CLOSED NOTABUG	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	6.0
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	All
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2000-02-24 17:28:29 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Matthew Saltzman 1999-11-14 20:15:09 UTC

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.

Comment 1 Matthew Saltzman 1999-11-15 14:32:59 UTC

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.

Comment 2 Erik Troan 2000-02-24 17:28:59 UTC

Either a tighter glob pattern or using a "olddir" entry will work around this.