logrotate and scripts that just cant let go.

I just found out that a logrotate job I had configured X months ago wasn't working when the lead came up to me and said 'what the $#!k is a 5GB file doing in my /var/log?' He was pissed because this was the second time logrotate had not been configured correctly (both times, my fault). The first time, we discovered logrotate.conf cannot have comments in it. This time, it looked like logrotate had run, but the script had kept the filehandle to the old log file open and was continuing to log to the rotated file.


One way to do this is send a HUP to the process in the postrotate script of the logrotate. This would mean I had to modify the script to trap the HUP signal, release the filehandle, get a handle to the new (same name) log file, and keep rolling on. I decided not to do this because it involved modifying the original script and I didn't have that much time to relearn things.

The second way I ended up doing this was to kill and restart the process during postrotate. Here is the config file in /etc/logrotate.d

/var/log/response_process.log {
daily
missingok
rotate 52
compress
delaycompress
notifempty
create 640 root adm
sharedscripts
postrotate
kill $(ps ax | grep process.rb | grep -v 'grep' | awk '{print $1}')
ruby process.rb -logfile:/var/log/response_process.log > /dev/null 2>&1
endscript
}

kind of hacky, but I didn't have to expend any mental effort making sure that the filehandle was truly closed in the script.