Log compression Bash script

From : http://www.stardothosting.com

In my experience as a Systems Administrator, it has come up quite often to create

a script to rotate and compress rather large log files.

These log files could be anything: java logs, apache logs (apache should have its
own log rotation built in) and mail logs for example. This script has two modes :
daily and monthly.

The daily mode is intended to be run daily (obviously) , gzipping the previous
days log file. The monthly mode, run monthly (obviously), then tar’s up all the
previous month’s gzip files into one big tarball.

Note that this script assumes the log filenames are assorted by the filename +
date (year/month/day). This can obviously be modified to suit the specific syntax
of your log file names.

Here is the script :

#!/bin/sh
# Rotate / compress old logs
# Star Dot Hosting

yesterday=`date --date='1 day ago' +%Y-%m-%d`

lastmonth=`date --date='1 month ago' +%Y-%m`
lasttwomonth=`date --date='2 months ago' +%Y-%m`
currentmonth=`date "+%Y-%m-%d"`
logdir="/path/to/log/directory"
logfilename="log-file-name"

#gzip yesterdays log

if [ "$1" = "daily" ]
then
gzip $logdir/$logfilename.$yesterday.log
exit 0

#tar all last month's logs on the 1st of each month

elif [ "$1" = "monthly" ]
then
tar -C $logdir -cf $logdir/$logfilename.$lastmonth.tar $logdir/
$logfilename.$lastmonth-*.log.gz && rm -f $logdir/$logfilename.$lastmonth-*.log.gz
exit 0
else
echo "no or invalid arguments given."
echo "syntax : ./logcompress.sh daily or ./logcompress.sh monthly"
exit 1
fi

I simply make two crontab entries :

0 3 * * * /bin/sh /usr/local/bin/logcompress.sh daily

0 5 1 * * /bin/sh /usr/local/bin/logcompress.sh monthly

The above entries run the script daily at 3:00am, and monthly on the 1st of every
month at 5:00am, this ensures the script isn’t run at the same time on the 1st as
the daily job.

That’s it!