Simple log file archiving

Some ESB servers at work produce log files for each day, and they can grow quite large. In addition the log directory becomes annoyingly full which makes it a bit "blah" to grep for recent stuff. So I figured I could save some space by compressing them.

Decided to experiment a bit and created a simple little script to archive the log files for certain months and figured I might as well share it. Especially since it might be handy to learn from later when I've forgotten how I did it 😛

Simply create a file called for example doarchive.sh in the log directory and stick this in it:

[ $# -eq 0 ] && { echo "Usage: $0 yyyy-mm [yyyy-mm] ..."; exit 1; }

for i in "$@"
do
  echo "-- $i"

  y=${i%-*}
  m=${i#*-}

  echo mkdir...
  mkdir -p archived/$y/$m

  echo mv...
  mv *$y-$m* archived/$y/$m/

  echo bzip2...
  bzip2 -v archived/$y/$m/*$y-$m*

  echo DONE
done

Then remember to make it executable.

$ chmod u+x doarchive.sh

To archive logfiles from June and July, you can then do the following:

$ ./doarchive.sh 2012-06 2012-07

This, of course, assumes the filenames of your log files contains the date in ISO format. For example stuff.log.2012-06-23.

Should probably have some error checking for malformed input and not do anything if there are no log files etc, but yeah... it works. 🙂