varlog

Alan To summarize the other answers,

Unless your machine is fantastically busy, misconfigured to cause enormous amounts of messages to the logfile(s), etc., distributions of Linux often contain a logrotate program, frequently (always in Red Hat systems) pre-configured to manage this problem. Once a day the logrotate program runs, but its configuration files are such that it only does things once a week. Basically, it moves each file back so that

messages.4 is deleted. messages.3 becomes messages.4 messages.2 becomes messages.3 messages.1 becomes messages.2 messages becomes messages.1 and a new messages file is created.

I never bothered out to find out if logrotate creates the new messages file, or whether the logger does it. The only trick is to make the logging programs start using the new logfile, and I buttume this is done by senting them a signal to notify them to do that. Note that logrotate does not just do thevar-log-messages file. It can do any files if you configure it to do that.

This buttumes that you leave your system running 24-7, because cron is normally set to do this at around 4AM. You can change the time, but you normally do not want these things running when you are most actively using your system as other tasks are also done then, including making the database for the locate command, and that can make the system slow (IO limited from disk).

Red Hat, and probably others, also has a program called anacron that runs soon after you boot the system and can run logrotate as well. I hate it when that happens as it happens just when I want to do something and do not want all those tasks annoying me.

-- .~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642. V PGP-Key: 9A2FC99A Registered Machine 241939. ^^-^^ 09:15:00 up 10 days, 2:52, 3 users, load average: 3.23, 3.26, 3.31