/var/log/maillog.1 to another directory for archiving.
The archive directory contains a subdirectory for each year's mail logs.
Today is the first day of a new year, so I needed to create a 2017 directory.
I could manually create the directory, but I thought I'd modify the Bash
script that runs from Cron to check on whether the current year's directory exists
and, if it doesn't create it, so, if I forget in future years to create a
new year's directory the script will create it for me.
You can check if a directory exists with code similar to what is shown below:
if [ -d "$DIRECTORY" ]; then # Insert code to be executed fi
Or, to check if a directory doesn't exist and execute commands if it doesn't:
if [ ! -d "$DIRECTORY" ]; then # Insert code to be executed fi
Note: putting the $DIRECTORY variable in double quotes allows for cases where the directory name may contain a space. Though that won't be the case for my yearly subdirectories, it is something you can allow for by enclosing the variable name in double quotes.
I put the following code in my copy-maillog-daily Bash
script to create a copy of yesterday's maillog file in the
/root/Documents/logs/maillog/$year subdirectory:
#!/bin/bash # # Copy each days maillog file to an archive directory year=$(date --date=yesterday +%Y) # Check on whether the directory for the current year exists and, if it doesn't, # create it. if [ ! -d /root/Documents/logs/maillog/"$year" ]; then mkdir /root/Documents/logs/maillog/$year fi cp -a /var/log/maillog.1 /root/Documents/sysinfo/logs/maillog/$year/maillog.$(date --date=yesterday +%m%d%y)
The script is made executable with chmod u+x copy-maillog-daily
and is run each day with the following
crontab entry which will
be run at 5 minutes after midnight each day:
5 0 * * * /root/bin/copy-maillog-daily 1>/dev/null 2>/dev/null
Note: the crontab file for the account under which the command is
run can be edited with the
crontab utility using crontab -e.
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