Reads input from a FIFO and writes it into a file specified with strftime(3) syntax. Enables logfiles with date-based names without restarting services periodically.
make
The main use for this is to get log files named by date or similar without having to do log rotation and restart/reload services. Some services/processes might even have a very long runtime making it impossible.
- Run as an unprivileged user dedicated to log handling.
- First argument must be a fifo writable by the service doing logging and readable by your chosen log handling user.
- Second argument is the target file, formatted using strftime(3).
- File is reopened hourly, so per-minute etc formats is useless.
- When having many log files it makes sense to implement startup and sanity checking (paths, fifo, permissions, etc) in a script.
Example:
The following command would read the fifo /var/log/xferlog and emit
log files named xferlog_YYYY-MM-DD in the /var/log/fifologger
directory.
fifologger /var/log/xferlog /var/log/fifologger/xferlog_%Y-%m-%d