albertopires / log_split

Split log files

Log_split

Log_split reads data from stdin and writes to a log file, when this log file reaches a specified size it is split.
The idea is to have a clean way to handle output from a program that is usually sent to a log file using something like:
"exemple_program > output.log"
While this works fine, sometimes the log file may grow very fast or to a very large size and then the only way to erase or clean the log file is to restart the program.
So far I couldn't find a way to clean the log file so I wrote log_split, that way I can have a clean way to compress or delete chunks of log data and also have the option to turn on/off log writing via SIGHUP, witch can be very useful during debugging.

Example

alberto@home:~/git/log_split (master)$ ./log_split
Usage: ./log_split [-h] [-v] [-o]
    -h   Print this message and exit.
    -o   Start with log writer turned off.
    -n   Set log file name prefix.
    -s   Set max log file size. (in MB)
    -v   Display version information.

alberto@home:~/git/log_split (master)$ ./any_program 2>&1 | ./log_split -n any_program.log -s 500 &

in this example every time any_program.log reaches 500 MB it will be renamed and a new one will be created.
To turn on/off the output writing just send a signal hangup to the log_split process.

alberto@home:~/git/log_split (master)$ kill -HUP `pidof log_split`