Please help me understand how log files are managed.

[chrismyers]

Hi there,

/var/log contains lots of useful logs.

I can see that older logs appear to get gzipped.

My question is:

Do the logs continue to fill up disk space without expiring & being deleted?

Do I have to do this manually on the servers that I have built, or is there a system for cleaning out old logs?

Cheers,

Chris.

[compiledkernel]

http://gwos.org/udsf/doku.php/hardware:diagnosis

Brief log explanation there. Generally speaking no, Logrotate is by default used to gzip logs (and delete them) based on age.

For understanding logrotate read here --

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LinuxLogFiles