Is there a way to control how rotated log files are renamed?

[Elcoid]

Hello!

I see that rotating with Numbers yields files that look like this:

my_daemon_rCURRENT.log
my_daemon_r00000.log
my_daemon_r00001.log
...

and rotating with NumbersDirect yields files that look like this:

my_daemon_r00000.log
my_daemon_r00001.log
my_daemon_r00002.log
...

However, I would like to be able to have the following (as is usual on *nix from what I could see, and this is what file_rotate does by default), is it possible?

my_daemon.log
my_daemon.log.1
my_daemon.log.2
...

[emabee]

That's not implemented so far - thanks for the proposal!

[emabee]

May I ask about the advantage of this approach, as it comes with the disadvantage that the rotated files cannot be easily recognized as log files?

[Elcoid]

First, it's pretty standard on Unix systems. For example, here on an Ubuntu machine, in /var/log I have boot.log, boot.log.1, boot.log.2, ... (Other daemons also compress older rotated logs while other start at 0 instead of 1, so I also have dpkg.log, dpkg.log.1, dpkg.log.2.gz, dpkg.log.3.gz, ... and dmesg, dmesg.0, dmesg.1.gz, dmesg.2.gz in the same directory.)

So there might be people with scripts and frameworks already written for this type of naming scheme.

Second, in my case specifically, I have a service writing in a log and another process monitoring the log and sending alerts when it reads certain keywords (like errors and so on). Initially, both services were reading the path of the log file from the same config file. However when I enabled log rotation, I had to split the config to tell the first service to write to /path/to/file.log but tell the second service to monitor /path/to/file_rCURRENT.log.

Then, when I receive an alert and want to copy the log files from the server for analysis, I could select the path in the config and add a wildcard (*) at the end to include the current log and all the rotated ones (i.e. /path/to/file.log* would include file.log, file.log.1, file.log.2, etc.). However, with an infix, I have to parse the path and insert the wildcard before the trailing .log to do the same thing (/path/to/file*.log), which is slightly more complicated.

So all in all, it's not a dealbreaker, but it would make things smoother.