
 README for <shrotate>
==========================================================



 Introduction
-----------------------------------------------------------

 <shrotate> is a utility for rotation of log
 files. It uses the GNU shtool for making the
 rotation.

 There are many log rotation tools out there,
 most of them come with the operating system
 and are, in most cases, not portable. That
 means, if you know 'newsyslog' of freebsd,
 this doesn't help you if you are on solaris.
 The same applies if you know 'logrotate' of
 Redhat linux and are on Debian linux, which
 has it's own thing (savelog, for the curious).

 This situation annoyed me. And perhaps it
 annoys you, too. If yes - read on.

 Some day I wanted to port the Redhat 'logrotate'
 tool to FreeBSD and Solaris. But, you guess,
 it didn't work. It's a totally 'linuxish'
 piece of software. You probably know this,
 of course it compiles on linux, but they never
 tried it on a true uni*x system :-)

 But there was a solution, I found that the new
 GNU 'shtool' has a new command, 'rotate', which
 does what I needed. And it does the job the
 way I need it. And it *is* portable :-)

 On the other hand - I really like the configuration
 of the Redhat logrotate, so I decided to write
 a wrapper which supports such a configuration
 file, which was required anyway, because 'shtool'
 does not support a configuration file, it will be
 controlled via the commandline.

 The result is <shrotate>. It reads a configuration
 file (which has, btw, more capabilities as the
 Redhat 'logrotate' "template"), and creates 'shtool'
 commandlines based on the configuration and finally
 executes them.




 Installation
-----------------------------------------------------------

 Make sure you have the latest 'shtool' installed. It must
 be version 1.5.4 or higher. You can find it out by entering:

  # shtool -v

 Edit the Makefile if you like and enter this command:

  # make install

 The binary 'shrotate' will be installed by default to
 /usr/bin. 

 The sample configuration file will be placed in /etc and
 named 'shrotate.conf.dist' to make sure it does not
 interfere a possibly existing shrotate installation.
 Edit this file and move it to 'shrotate.conf' if you
 are done.

 Now add a crontab entry for 'shrotate':

  # rotate every month once
  5 00 1 * * /usr/bin/shrotate -d > /var/log/shrotate.log 2>&1

 (note: the -d flag turns debugging output on, which might
 be usefull sometimes).




 Documentation
-----------------------------------------------------------

 You will find the complete documentation of
 <shrotate> in the manpage, just type:

   # man shrotate

 The distribution tarball contains a sample config
 which you can use as a starting point.




 Copyright
-----------------------------------------------------------

 (c) 2002 Copyright Thomas Linden <tom@daemon.de>




 License
-----------------------------------------------------------

 Artistic License. See the file COPYING for details.





 Authors
-----------------------------------------------------------

 Thomas Linden <scip@daemon.de>




 $Id$
