Empty log files daily using cron task-CodePudding

I want to empty (not delete) log files daily at a particular time. something like

echo "" > /home/user/dir/log/*.log

but it returns

-bash: /home/user/dir/log/*.log: ambiguous redirect

is there any way to achieve this?

CodePudding user response：

You can try this.
Remove and recreate those files using For Loop.
create .sh file ( something.sh ) and add below code in it.


#!/bin/bash

for f in /home/user/dir/log/*.log
do
   [ -f "$f" ] && rm "$f"
   touch "$f"
done

run in cron every night

* 22 * * * /file path/something.sh

CodePudding user response：

You can't redirect to more than one file, but you can tee to multiple files.

tee /home/user/dir/log/*.log </dev/null

The redirect from /dev/null also avoids writing an empty line to the beginning of each file, which was another bug in your attempt. (Perhaps specify nullglob to avoid creating a file with the name *.log if the wildcard doesn't match any existing files, though.)

However, a much better solution is probably to use the utility logrotate which is installed out of the box on every Debian (and thus also Ubuntu, Mint, etc) installation. It runs nightly by default, and can be configured by dropping a file in its configuration directory. It lets you compress the previous version of a log file instead of just overwrite, and takes care to preserve ownership and permissions etc.