Better (stable) names for rotated logfiles

Joshua Judson Rosen jrosen at harvestai.com
Tue Mar 20 19:27:22 UTC 2012


I'm working on a patch to make the busybox syslogd's log-rotation 
facility produce rotated logfiles with stable filename, i.e.: rather 
than appending a series-number to the filename and rotating the numbers, 
I append a *timestamp* to the name--and the name of a rotated logfile 
then never needs to change.

Is there any interest in having this upstream in busybox? Do other 
people want to do this?
Alternately, is this somehow a bad idea (what should I be doing instead?).

The idea here is basically to eliminate the race-condition that exists 
when trying to, for example, copy the logfiles off of a system: syslogd 
may decide to rotate, and hence rename all of the logfiles, while I'm in 
the middle of downloading the series onto another machine, and I may end 
up missing a file somewhere in the middle.

It's mostly a straightforward change, and easy to #ifdef out--the only 
`funny' part is that I can't just let the oldest logfile in the series 
`get rename()'d off the end', but rather need to glob and count the results.

-- 
"Don't be afraid to ask (λf.((λx.xx) (λr.f(rr))))."



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