create e.g. a logfile which is not increasing in size

[Roger Hotz]

Dear all

Does anyone know how to create a file which
e.g. has a max size of 100MB and is not increasing if data is written to it. Would be
helpful for logfiles which should not grow more
than a defined size.

Thanks for any help
Roger

[Rita C Workman]

Well, , I believe you can use ulimit to limit the file size of a process...

Check manpage ulimit


/rcw

[Bruce Regittko_1 · Accepted solution]

Hi,

If you want the file to continuously get updated, yet not grow beyond a certain size, I'm not sure ulimit is best. I think ulimit will just stop writing to the file after it grows too large. See the man page for sh-posix and search for ulimit to find out.

Anyway, attached is a simple (that is, crude and inefficient) script that will trim a file below a certain size. Drop it into a crontab and you will never have to worry about it again :).

--Bruce

[Steffi Jones_1]

Hi Roger,

if you have an idea how fast the file grows you could actually setup a cronjob where the file will be renamed to log.1 or similiar and a new one will be touched.

Logfiles will always grow and some pretty fast, so it is up to you to determine what timeframe you need to empty the files.

Hope that helps a bit,

Steffi Jones

[Tim Malnati]

As an alternative you may want to look at the logrotate utility. Although it does not directly limit logfile size it has a bunch of goodies that allow you to setup automatic rotation, archiving, compression, truncation, email to specified users, etc. It's PD software and it has been ported to HPUX at http://hpux.cs.utah.edu/hppd/hpux/Sysadmin/logrotate-2.5