The logrotate directions for a daemon named app put at /etc/logrotate.d/app.
# cat /etc/logrotate.d/app /logs/app/gen.log { daily missingok rotate 7 compress copytruncate notifempty } /logs/app/sec.log { weekly mail administratotator@sys.ipduh.com missingok rotate 4 shred create 640 app app }
Directives explanation ( from the manual ).
daily, weekly , monthly Handle time period (The handling trigger may be the file size) missingok If the log file is missing, go on to the next one without issuing an error message. rotate count Log files are rotated count times before being removed or mailed to the address specified in a mail directive. If count is 0, old versions are removed rather than rotated. compress Old versions of log files are compressed with gzip(1) by default. copytruncate Truncate the original log file to zero size in place after creating a copy, instead of moving the old log file and optionally creating a new one. It can be used when some program cannot be told to close its logfile and thus might continue writing (appending) to the previous log file forever. Note that there is a very small time slice between copying the file and truncating it, so some logging data might be lost. When this option is used, the create option will have no effect, as the old log file stays in place. notifempty Do not rotate the log if it is empty (this overrides the ifempty option). create mode owner group Immediately after rotation (before the postrotate script is run) the log file is created (with the same name as the log file just rotated). mode specifies the mode for the log file in octal (the same as chmod(2)), owner specifies the user name who will own the log file, and group specifies the group the log file will belong to. Any of the log file attributes may be omitted, in which case those attributes for the new file will use the same values as the original log file for the omitted attributes. shred Delete log files using shred -u instead of unlink(). This should ensure that logs are not readable after their scheduled deletion; this is off by default. See also noshred.
Run now (to test) logrotate directions for app.
# logrotate --force app
Debug logrotate directions for app.
# logrotate --force --debug app
Logrotate Notes