logrotate features

[nemo_]

Hi All,

I have a little question about logrotate - some users might know this :
is it possible to keep running logrotate but not having it rename each and every log when it increments the indexes at the end ?

in other words: say I have blah.log, blah.log.1 and blah.log2
logrotate would then do something like this : mv blah.log.2 blah.log.3; mv blah.log.1 blah.log.2; mv blah.log blah.log.1
what I would like instead : keep blah.log.1 and blah.log.2 and rotate directly to blah.log.3

the reason why I'd like this is because this system is backed up via rdiff-backup, and since all rotated log files change between each backup run it needs to retransfer and store them all each time (alltho in fact only the name of the log file changed for all but the last one). this wastes a huge ammount of bandwith and storage.

I hope I'm making sense here =)

TIA for any good advice.

[madchaz]

Then you don't really need to use logrotate. You could just overwrite your logs couldn't you?
_________________
Someone asked me once if I suffered from mental illness. I told him I enjoyed every second of it.

[nemo_]

well no, I do want to rotate them so they can be compressed and stored properly.
I just want the filename to be static - that is, if blah.log.3 was today's rotated log file then I'd like it to keep the same filename for ever (and not have it renamed to blah.log.4 the next day etc etc).

I know i could just write a replacement script but since logrotate is otherwise great for me it'd be much simpler if i could just get it to behave like that.

[Grahammm]

Could you not use the 'dateext' option so that logrotate generates date based backups? That way you would have blah.log, blah.log-20060202.gz, blah.log-20060203.gz and when logrotate runs today it will create blah.log-20060204.gz keeping as many (or as old) logs as configured.

[nemo_]

thanks grahammm, I will try that ! it should solve my problem indeed.