How to rollover the standard output from bash?

Question

I have a script running in the background that prints some output. I redirected the standard output to a file for log purposes. However I don't want this file to grow forever, what would be a good way to do rollover without coding the logic myself? (Either rollover based on date or file size).

Answer 1

logrotate(8)

Answer 2

Pipe the output into something like multilog it will handle all that stuff for you.

And example:

script_that_produces_output.sh |multilog s2000 ./logdir

will run the script capturing stdout to a file called ./logdir/current rotating it when it is bigger than 2000 bytes.

Answer 3

As well as multilog, there's also a similar tool called svlogd from the runit suite. You may find that already packaged in your distro, since daemontools (multilog) has only recently become public domain.