NewSyslog 1.1 review

NewSyslog is a highly configurable program for managing and archiving log files. Here are some key features of "NewSyslog": · It

License: Freely Distributable File size: 0K Developer: Greg A. Woods

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NewSyslog is a highly configurable program for managing and archiving log files.

Here are some key features of "NewSyslog":
It is more portable (using GNU Autoconf) and it can be compiled and installed on most any modern Unix or Unix-like system.
It has support for fixed time-of-day daily archiving with a command-line option to identify the daily roll-over invocation (which may be at midnight, or at any other regular daily time).
It supports the FreeBSD feature that allows specification of the log roll-over time as a daily, weekly, or monthly interval (with optional time-of-day specification for the last two). [The other overly flexible, ISO 8601 interpretation of the interval "@" option is not supported -- it is too generic and not meaningful enough in the context of log file management.]
It supports optional PID files so that non-standard daemons can be told to re-open their logfiles after archiving has taken place. (Including /dev/null which disables signalling of any daemon when the specified log file is rolled over.)
It can send a signal other than SIGHUP to the daemon associated with a given log file.
It can leave the most recently archived log file uncompressed, which is necessary for daemons like httpd and smail because they continue to write to the current log file until their current jobs have completed. (This also makes it much easier to review recent log data with normal Unix tools.) [NetBSD now has this feature.]
It supports the FreeBSD feature of being able to restrict processing to just those log files specified on the command line.
Unlike the NetBSD version it first parses the config file before taking any action, meaning that if any errors are encountered it will report them and quit without doing anything.
Unlike the FreeBSD version, it will roll a log file if either the interval or size limits have been reached (FreeBSD's version makes it too easy to have a rapidly growing log file overflow the filesystem).
Unlike the NetBSD version it always creates any missing log file (though this can be disabled on a per-file basis).
It uses an advisory lock on the current configuration file to prevent multiple invocations from tripping over each other.
The documentation is far better!