NewSyslog is an updated version of a package put together by Theodore Tso of MIT Project Athena (which is included in NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc.). It manages the rotation and archiving of log files (primarily those written to by syslogd). This version has a mix of features from all of the other versions, and it has been made more portable than any of the others with the help of GNU Autoconf.
| Tags | Internet Log Analysis Archiving Logging Systems Administration Utilities |
|---|---|
| Licenses | Freeware |
| Operating Systems | POSIX |
| Implementation | C |
Recent releases


Changes: This release adds the "/" flag to cause archiving into a ".old" sub-directory. It improves the interaction of '-v' and '-n' so that the mixed output on stdout can be directly processed by a shell (verbose output now appears as a shell comment). This release adds the '-q' (for quiet) option. There are various bugfixes.


Changes: A long-standing (since 1.0.93) locking bug that allowed multiple instances to run with the same config file at the same time has finally been found and fixed. A much more portable signal name translation scheme has been implemented to fix portability problems that were causing problems particularly for GNU/Linux users. Signal names and their descriptions are now printed when a child process is killed or stopped by a signal.


Changes: New log files are now created as temporary files and have their permissions and ownerships updated before they are renamed into place (inspired by a similar fix in FreeBSD's version). The verbose explanitory and debug messages have been greatly improved. Handling of PID files is now far more robust (inspired by fixes in OpenBSD's version). Child processes used to run file compressors are now tracked and abnormal terminations are reported.


Changes: This release fixes the minimum invocation interval to be one minute. It also includes more minor portability fixes for Linux and Solaris, as well as some minor documentation updates. This will hopefully be the last of the changes necessary before 1.1 can be released.


Changes: This is a relatively minor update. It fixes one minor bug in the parsing of timespecs and several portability issues. Signals are displayed symbolically in error messages, and verbose output shows the trim time in local time instead of as a Unix epoch time. New versions of GNU Autoconf and Automake were also used to create this distribution.
Server-based network diagnostics with route discovery and performance analysis.
- All comments
Recent commentsWildcards or directory
Have a directory of logs of either unknown names, or "too many to list". In particular from radius that just puts logs under NAS ip. Or http with many virtual hosts.
Would be nice to be able to specify an entire directory, "/path/dir/" or parhaps allow wildcards "/path/dir/*". And have it handle anything that matches. (Naturally knowing to ignore files created by itself *.gz or whatever).
Lundy
Date in file names
It would be very useful if newsyslog had an option to add date into archived file's name, for example, maillog.2002.11.25.gz instead of maillog.0.gz
I had to switch to another method of log rotation just because of this :/ (very unfortunate, since newsyslog otherwise would be an excellent alternative).
Re: Feature Request:
> The ability to specify a pipe in the
> syslog.conf would be very useful.
Presumably you're thinking of the program usually called 'syslogd', not this one, which is called 'newsyslog'. :-)
(note syslog-ng already has a pipe() driver)
Feature Request:
The ability to specify a pipe in the syslog.conf would be very useful.