OS = CentOS 4.8
logrotate 3.7.1


I noticed that one of our tomcat apps is archiving old files in the format "catalina.YYYY-MM-DD.log" and these are adding up and taking space (4 months worth so far)

I want to use logrotate to only retain the last 14 days of these logs.
So I created an app-specific logrotate config file at /etc/logrotate.d/myapp

/path/to/my/app/logs {
daily
maxage 14
rotate 0
}

After running 'logrotate -fv /etc/logrotate.d/myapp', it renamed those logfiles by appending a ".1" to the end each log. But did not delete any logfiles.

I've tried running the same command each day for several days, but still it has not deleted any old logfiles.

Am I doing something wrong?
Or perhaps I'm not understanding how it works? Do I have to wait 14 days for the deleting to begin?

I've spent several hours googling and reading examples, man pages, etc with no luck.

Thanks

As far as logrotate is concerned, each of those files is a separate log file from a separate program that needs to be rotated separately. logrotate intends to keep 14 of EACH of those files, not 14 total. That's why it stuck a ".1" onto each one, it was the first of 14 log files of that name.

You don't need logrotate, your program is already doing its own rotation, what you need is a simple cron job to delete any log files older than XX days.

Thanks suicidaleggroll,

Ah, that explains things.
Currently tomcat is creating these "catalina.YYYY-MM-DD.log" files due to the JULI configuration in logging.properties for my app's conf folder.

So there's no way for logrotate to handle the deletions for me?
I have to add a separate cronjob instead?

Or do you know of a better practice to follow (ie let logrotate handle everything for my tomcat instance's logfiles, and don't use JULI logging.properties)?

I have no experience with JULI/tomcat, so I can't help there.

Here's a little read on removing date stamped files with logrotate, with another note about using find in a cron job to actually do the work:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1...-stamped-files