how to rotate log files by filesize?

Question

ATTENTION: there are many articles about rotating log files by date/time. But i want to rotate log files by filesize. Is it possible?

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i have apache access_log file which is growing largely and taking up the entire server free space after 2/3 weeks. As a result my server sees no more free space after 2/3 weeks and i have to manually clean up the log file every 2/3 weeks.

Here is what i want to do:

• rotate the access_log file at every 5 MegaBytes.
• don't want to have more than 20 such files.
• if we reach 20x5MB files, then should remove the oldest log file first before creating a new rotation

Is it possible to do this?

Answer 1

Use the "size" parameter in the logrotate.conf to fix the max file size of the log file and the "rotate" option fix the number of rotation thus you can put:

/var/log/apache2/access_log {
    missingok
    notifempty
    size 5M
    rotate 20
    create 0600 apache2 apache2
} 

as usual, man logrotate is your best friend