clog writes rotating log files, like multilog.
It reads stdin and writes to a rotating series of logs in a directory.
The current log file is always called "current"; previous log files are renamed to roughly ISO 8601 format using the system time (hopefully UTC). A rotated file might be named:
a2013-03-09_19:50:33.048839
Deviations from strict ISO 8601 format are:
- Files start with 'a' for easy glob matching (think: "archive") and to place them in earlier lexicographical order than "current"
- An underscore is used to separate date from time instead of "T" for readability.
- A period, then zero-padded microseconds follows the time.
This format keeps all files sorted in lexicographical order.
ls LOG_DIR | tail will always give you the last 10 files,
including current. Similarly, ls LOG_DIR/a* | head -n -5 | xargs rm
will ensure only the most recent 5 archived logs are in LOG_DIR,
which is a safe pruning scheme.
Once an a* file is created, is is never renamed or deleted
unless you do so. This is a useful property for various
processing schemes.
clog will exit and flush any buffered data into a log file
when stdin is closed. If stdin does not end with a newline,
clog will append a newline.
The build process requires GNU make and gcc. Some libc
is needed, of course, but nothing else.
make && sudo make install
Using clog is very simple:
clog FILE_SIZE LOG_DIR
clog will make a decent effort to rotate the "current" file
when it reaches FILE_SIZE bytes. FILE_SIZE can also contain
a suffix (K, M, G, or T), for usage like:
/sbin/my_daemon | clog 100M /var/log/my_daemon
This would rotate files at 100 MB. You get the idea.
Thus far, clog has only been built on Linux. If you get it built
somewhere else and have patches, send 'em along. It's pretty much
just POSIX, so most things like Unix should work.
clogdoes not support dumping timestamps in your files.clogalso does not support removing old files.cloghas no pattern matching.