Question about /var/log files

bodisha · 05-19-2019, 09:42 AM

I'm looking at the files under /var/log on CentOS 7 and many of them have a date in their names (i.e. secure-20190512)... but the date in their names don't correspond to either the last message written to them... or their modification date... Which in this example were both May 10th... But the change date the stat command gives does correspond to May 12th

Can someone explain what's going on here? If the file was created and last written too on May 10th... Why does it have a May 12th date in it's name?

Thanks!

scasey · 05-19-2019, 10:29 AM

The date in the filename is the date the file was renamed by logrotate. That typically happens on Sundays with an out-of-the-box configuration.