Log File Maintenance and Cleanup

Log files sometimes take up a lot of disk space. Some applications have internal processes that run periodically to manage them and some do not. Often, this becomes a problems after a while as the logs consume all of your partition space.

You can manage these files yourself with a simple script running in a cronjob (or systemd timers if you’re so inclined) if they have a common naming convention and you have the proper access.

Let’s say you have an application called myapp that keeps it’s logs in a directory called /opt/myapp/logs and those files all end with a .log file extension.

cat >logmanage.sh <<"EOF" #!/bin/sh LOGDIR="/opt/myapp/logs" # Compress all of the files older than a day find ${LOGDIR} -name '*.log' -mtime +0 -exec compress {} \; # Purge all of the logs older than a week find ${LOGDIR} -name '*.Z' -mtime +7 -exec rm -f {} \; EOF

These two commands will compress those files that are more than older than a day and remove the compressed files after a week.

Add a crontab entry to run this everyday and you’re all set.

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