Hi All,
I am running apache web server and I was wondering if anyone had a good script for deleting old log files.

I am using cronolog with the following entries in my httpd.conf:
and
Notice I am sorting the logs into directories according to /year/month/day and I would like to delete anything older than 7 days.

I have no idea how to write this script.....would it be a cron job, or a function of cronolog, or some other logging tool?

Thanks

AFAIK, you do it in a cron, regardless of your method.

logrotate is designed to rotate, compress, remove old, & mail logs. You would run logrotate in a cron. see "man logrotate" (I would give examples if I knew it better, but don't... so see the man page )

if all you need to do is remove old logs, you can do that with a simple find command:

of course, you lose all the other fancy features of logrotate, but if all you're after is deleting files... that will do it.

fyi:
"-type f" means only return files (as opposed to files and directories and other stuff)
"-mtime +7" means anything older than 7 days (actually, older than 7*24 hours ago)
"-exec rm -v '{}'" means verbosely remove the file(s) - I like leaving verbosity on so that my cron mails me with what it did.

Awesome.....man that was fast!!!!

Another question: How can I make this recursive? Because I am storing files in a "/year/month/day/log.file" directory structure that rotates every 24hrs. I would need to delete all files older than 7 days and delete just the empty directories after the files were deleted 1st.

Thank you very much for your help!

Hi

i am using following command to delete the logs from my /var directory

find -P /var -name -"*.part" -mtime 2 -exec rm -rf {} \;

this is working fine but what i am facing problem is that, it also deletes the .part extension files from the sub directories of /var. can anybody please help me out on this? i just want to to make sure that it delete only from that 1 directory which i have mentioned in the command...

Thx/Asad

@ringding,

i have the same issue as of yours,
please let me know how to delete the old files and where do i do the cron job in detail as i am new to this.

Is there any good reason why you structure your logs like that? Each directory corresponding to year, month, day? You only want to keep your logs for a week, so that seems in my mind unnecessarily complicated. And then you already have that information in the file itself. Why don't you just use one folder where you can store the one-week logs?
Then you can easily appply logrotate on that directory with whatever criteria you like.

nharish143,
Welcome to LinuxQuestions.

This thread is over 11 years old and ringding has not been active for 8 years. Your question should be in its own thread but since there is no information there is little benefit to moving it. Please start a new thread and provide details on what linux distribution / version you are running. Most distributions are configured with logrotate which will save old logs then automatically delete them.