Perl-Logrotate **UPDATE**

** There is a depot for logrotate for HPUX available here: HP-UX Porting and Archiving Centre

If you work with Linux, you will eventually learn about logrotate. Logrotate is program that is run via cron that will rotate files, etc. It can also compress files, change permissions, and run other user provided commands. To learn more I would suggest reading the logrotate man page.

But what about UNICES like HP-UX or AIX? They don't come with this nifty binary by default. To get a similar functionality I use Perl-Logrotate. It's essentially a perl script that gives you a logrotate style solution to keeping logs. Basically you run the script via cron. And you keep your configuration info in a file called logrotate.conf. To keep with standards, I usaally put the file under /etc/ and I put the perl script under /sbin. You'll need to edit this line in the script to point to the config file.

# Configuration file to use.
our $config_file = 'logrotate.conf';

And here is a sample config file.

$ cat /etc/logrotate.conf
## Configuration for logrotate
# Please read logrotate for more information

logfile /var/adm/syslog/syslog.log

rotate-time 1 week
keep-files 2
compress yes
status-file /var/run/logrotate.status
dryrun no

logfile /var/adm/sulog

rotate-time 1 week
keep-files 1
compress yes
status-file /var/run/logrotate.status
dryrun no

logfile /var/adm/sudo.log

rotate-time 1 week
keep-files 1
compress yes
status-file /var/run/logrotate.status
dryrun no

As you can see the layout is similar to that of logrotate. So if you aren't looking to re-invent the wheel and need a way to rotate log files, then Perl-Logrotate might be the solution for you.