Automatically clean up logs with a cron job

April 15, 2017 - Reading time: ~1 minute

Since a lot of our applications generate enormous log files while running on Tomcat, Play, ... We have to intervene and clean them up and since zipping those logs makes a huge improvement on disk space consumption this is how I do it. Of course you can use ZFS with native disk compression too :)

I install this cron (as the user that runs the application). It will clean up all the logs that aren't in use and will clean up the archived logs after 30 days. And the neat thing is that recent versions of Vim kan still read the log while zipped, deflating it on the fly.

find /opt/ -type f \( -mtime +30 -iname "*.[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9].log.gz" -exec rm -f {} \; -o -iname "*.[0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9]-[0-9][0-9].log" -exec gzip {} \; \)