Re: Strange behaviour in logging files and log rotatation, hopefully an easy answer?

Bob Brennan wrote:

On 5/17/05, Paul Howarth <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

You need to get the server to close the log file and reopen it (which

will access the new file). This is usually done by using a "postrotate"
script in logrotate that sends an appropriate signal to the server. For
example, in the standard FC3 httpd logrotate file, there is:

    postrotate
        /bin/kill -USR1 `cat /var/run/httpd.pid 2>/dev/null` 2>
/dev/null || /bin/true
    endscript

Thanks Paul - looking in my own logrotate file for httpd I find:
"/bin/kill -USR1 `cat /var/run/httpd.pid 2>/dev/null` 2> /dev/null || true"
as the postrotate command, nearly the same as your line except for the
/bin/true part.

I will put that postrotate command into my less critical site's
logrotate files and see what happens over the next few days, then put
it into all logrotates that exhibit the problem.

The "|| true" probably won't make any difference; it just keeps logrotate happy that the script has run, even if there's been an error.

Are you sure that /var/run/httpd.pid has the PID of your httpd process?

Paul.