| Russ Allbery > Software > newsyslog | newsyslog Manual Page > |
(periodic log rotation and maintenance)
Written by Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu>
Copyright 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2005 Board of Trustees, Leland Stanford Jr. University. This software is distributed under an MIT-style license. Please see the section LICENSE below for terms of use and redistribution.
This package is designed to perform periodic maintenance on system log files. Its primary design goals are to make the specification of what maintenance to perform as flexible as possible, to be as self-contained as possible to decrease reliance on other packages, and to be as safe and as paranoid in its operation as possible (and to be extremely verbose in its error reporting).
In its current version, it handles moving or copying logs into one or more archive directories, compressing them in the process, and running arbitrary commands or sending signals to stop and restart servers so that logs can be rotated.
For the full details of what newsyslog can do, see the included man page. All operation of newsyslog is controlled by a configuration file, by default /usr/local/etc/newsyslog.conf. See the file CONFIG for a sample configuration file; another, shorter sample with fewer comments is embedded in the man page.
This package uses Autoconf and should compile and install like any other Autoconf package. If you're familiar with that procedure (running configure, make, and then make install), that's all you have to do. For complete installation instructions, see INSTALL.
This package compresses logs internally on the fly, and therefore requires and links against a compression library, either zlib or bzip2. For support for the -b option, bzip2 is required; if zlib is not installed, then the -b option must always be used.
Neither zlib nor bzip2 are included in this package; if they are not already installed on your system, you can obtain a copy of zlib at:
and a copy of bzip2 at:
Note that you will need to install the library and header files from bzip2, not just the programs.
Both of these packages are also available in RPM format as part of the base Red Hat distribution, in .deb format as part of the base Debian distribution, and are likely available in the native package format of any other Linux distribution. To build this package, you will need to have the libraries and header files installed, which means you may have to install the -devel or -dev version of the package as well as the basic version.
newsyslog obviously also requires a C compiler. If you plan to hack on the sources, you'll need gcc (since the dependency generation assumes it), bison, flex, pod2man to generate the man page, and Autoconf 2.57 or later if you plan on modifying the configure script. None of those additional programs are required to build the distribution (the output of bison and flex is included in the tarball).
Copyright 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2005 Board of Trustees, Leland Stanford Jr. University.
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
| Russ Allbery > Software > newsyslog | newsyslog Manual Page > |