Introduction

Reads input from a FIFO and writes it into a file specified with strftime(3) syntax. Enables logfiles with date-based names without restarting services periodically.

Building

make

Using

The main use for this is to get log files named by date or similar without having to do log rotation and restart/reload services. Some services/processes might even have a very long runtime making it impossible.

• Run as an unprivileged user dedicated to log handling.
• First argument must be a fifo writable by the service doing logging and readable by your chosen log handling user.
• Second argument is the target file, formatted using strftime(3).
• File is reopened hourly, so per-minute etc formats is useless.
• When having many log files it makes sense to implement startup and sanity checking (paths, fifo, permissions, etc) in a script.

Example:

The following command would read the fifo /var/log/xferlog and emit log files named xferlog_YYYY-MM-DD in the /var/log/fifologger directory.

fifologger /var/log/xferlog /var/log/fifologger/xferlog_%Y-%m-%d