[CentOS] Logrotate "firstaction" with non-0 exit status. Or: How to keep logrotate from rotating via scripts?

Toralf Lund

toralf.lund at pgs.com
Wed Oct 3 11:03:43 UTC 2012


Hi,

I'm wondering if anyone here has any experience with the "firstaction" 
script in logrotate config files, or more specifically, the behaviour 
with a non-0 exit status. The logrotate manpage says:

firstaction/endscript

    The lines between firstaction and endscript (both of which must
    appear on lines by themselves) are executed (using /bin/sh) once
    before all log files that match the wildcarded pattern are rotated,
    before prerotate script is run and only if at least one log will
    actually be rotated.
    These directives may only appear inside a log file definition. Whole
    pattern is passed to the script as first argument. If the script
    exits with error,
    no further processing is done. See also lastaction.


My question is, what exactly does "no further processing is done" mean? 
The obvious interpretation seems to be that the log file will not be 
rotated, but based on tests I've done, this does not seem to be the 
case. If I run logrotate with this config:

/tmp/testfile {
    missingok
    size 0
    rotate 1000
    copytruncate
    firstaction
      false
    endscript
}

I get the message:

error: error running first action script for /tmp/testfile

But /tmp/testfile is still copied to /tmp/testfile.1 (provided that it 
exists.) Then if I run again, I end up with /tmp/testfile, 
/tmp/testfile.1 and /tmp/testfile.2, and so on...

Does this mean the manpage note must be interpreted differently? Or is 
perhaps the behaviour buggy? And, is there any way at all I can use 
commands in the config file to control whether the rotation is done or 
not; this is what I'm looking for, really?

I've tested this on CentOS release 5.8...


- Toralf

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