logrotate and date variables
 

Hi all.

OS: 12.04.1 LTS (GNU/Linux 3.2.0-30-generic x86_64)

I have some questions about logrotate and using it together with some custom scripts that i have added to the crontab.

As far as i have understood, its possible to add custom logs that will be managed by logrotate.

The scripts im using create their own directory structure
/path/to/the/logs
`-- 2012
`-- September
|-- 2012.Sep.08.logFile1.log
|-- 2012.Sep.08.logFile2.log
`-- 2012.Sep.08.logFile3.log

The path to where the logs are stored and the name of the log files themselves will change each month/day.

I have been searching for a way to pass variables to logrotate, making it understand the dates thats used by the script and make it look for them in the correct path.

Im thinking something down the lines of telling logrotate to rotate the file in:
/path/to/the/logs/$YEAR/$MONTH/$YEAR.$M.$D.logfile$NR.log

From the man pages of logrotate i found the 'dateformat' and 'dateext' option, but as far as i can understand its not what im looking for here as its not only the name of the log files thats changing, but also the directories in which they are stored.

Is this even possible or will i have to change the scripts to be more logrotate "friendly"?

My apologies if this has been answered before, but i could not find anything that could solve it.

What you're telling us is the application or (r)syslog(-ng) rotates logs itself based on a "%Y/%B/%Y.%b.%d.*whatever.log" output template. So you don't need logrotate. If you want compression of "old" log files, for example of the previous month, you could achieve that with a simple script, a cron job, selecting your path based on a date setting like '/bin/date +"%Y/%B/" --date="1 month ago";' would output "2012/August/".

Hi unSpawn

Appreciate you taking the time and replying to me.

Eventually i created a standalone script that sorted this, much like you describe.