Hourly rotation of files using logrotate?

linux cron rhel logrotate
Kishore picture Kishore · Aug 25, 2014 · Viewed 83k times · Source

I tried to set up a log rotation of logs files located at /tmp/hr_logs/. For setting up, I used logrotate in linux and I'm able to rotate it on daily basis using the following config in my /etc/logrotate.conf

  /tmp/hr_logs {
  daily
  rotate 4

With this config, file will rotate on daily basis and system will keep 4 copies of the log file appended with date [format: -YYYYMMDD]

Now, I trying to set up a different set of log files which I need to make rotate on hourly basis and for it, i have done the configuration in logrotate.conf:

  /tmp/last_logs {
  hourly
  rotate 4

But this is not at all working? Can anyone please guide me on this please?

Answer

scai picture scai · Aug 25, 2014

The manpage of logrotate.conf contains an important advice for the hourly option:

Log files are rotated every hour. Note that usually logrotate is configured to be run by cron daily. You have to change this configuration and run logrotate hourly to be able to really rotate logs hourly.

As pointed out by yellow1pl the solution is to copy the file /etc/cron.daily/logrotate into the /etc/cron.hourly/ directory. This works at least for Debian and possibly some Debian derivates.

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