Hi,

I'd be nice if it'd be possible to tell logrotate "do not try to update your state file". I can see two ways to do this: add some flag --do-not-update-state-file or pass /dev/null as a state file. In the latter case, if logrotate would see that it got /dev/null, then it wouldn't bother renaming the file etc. I think the /dev/null variant would be less work.

Rationale: recently I've been often using the following pattern:

# cat /etc/cron.d/some_menial_task
0 3 * * www-data root clean_up

# cat /usr/local/bin/clean_up
#!/bin/bash
if cleanup_running; then
  exit 0
fi
(
  do_stuff_that_takes_long
  maybe_more_than_a_day
) > /var/log/clean_up/log
logrotate --force /etc/logrotate.d.manual/clean_up

That script runs daily (maybe) and takes long, maybe a day or longer. Once it's done i want to rotate logs. Since I do not want to rotate logs daily, but only after the clean_up has run, I can not put the rotation job into /etc/logrotate.d/clean_up, but instead I have to call it manually.

Since the clean_up script is running as non-root, I just want logrotate to rotate the logs as that user and not bother changing ownerships of the logs. And I don't want it to bother updating it's state file either, since it's me who controls rotation logic and policy, and since the state file belongs to root which logrotate can't change as user www-data.

In short, instead of writing my own rotation logic I, as non-root, want to use the tool at hand that knows it all and does it best: logrotate. So it'd be nice to be able to call logrotate and be done with it, without logrotate trying to manage its state file.

So I'm putting this proposal up here for consideration.

Thanks a lot for logrotate!
*t