logrotate in SUSE Enterprise Server

Question

I can't manage to work this dummy config file (I placed it in etc/logrotate.d):

/var/log/test_log/mylogfile {
copytruncate
dateext
rotate 3
compress
missingok
size=+2
}

I write to the log (echo "hello world" > /var/log/test_log/mylogfile) but it's just not working.

Doing cat /etc/crontab shows:

# check scripts in cron.hourly, cron.daily, cron.weekly, and cron.monthly
#
-*/15 * * * *   root  test -x /usr/lib/cron/run-crons && /usr/lib/cron/run-crons >/dev/null 2>&1

I later redirected the output to in this way:

-*/15 * * * *   root  test -x /usr/lib/cron/run-crons && /usr/lib/cron/run-crons > /var/log/test_log/log_logrotate

But nothing happened.

Should I add another line in the etc/crontab to force the cron.dayly to happen kind of like in Ubuntu:

25 6    * * *   root    test -x /usr/sbin/anacron || ( cd / && run-parts --report /etc/cron.daily )

or the problem may be in the /usr/lib/cron/run-crons file??

I am under SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 SP2

Answer 1

I think I found an answer to my question. The issue was tricky because "the newer Cron versions of Linux may run abit differently than in older versions" to what I was used to.

It seems now Cron consists of the script usr/lib/cron/run-crons, which checks whether cron.dayly in /var/spool/cron/lastrun/ is older than one day (By default it checks if it is more than or exactly 1440 minutes since lastrun). Or if we want the cron.dayly to run at a fixed time we should set the DAILY_TIME variable in the /etc/sysconfig/cron file to a time (i.e:"12:00") and it will be run at that time dayly (within 15minutes).

Note (from the /etc/sysconfig/cron comments):Due to the fact that cron script runs only every 15 minutes, it will only run on xx:00, xx:15, xx:30, xx:45, not at the accurate time you set.

I found the answer here:

Answer 2

logrotate runs either when time period is given weekly, daily and so on, or in the case of size when filesize exeeds the given size.

Just put there size=2, instead of size=+2, and it should work.

size size

Log files are rotated when they grow bigger then size bytes. If size is followed by M, the size if assumed to be in megabytes. If the k is used, the size is in kilobytes. So size 100, size 100k, and size 100M are all valid.