Comments on: How to rotate catalina.out without restarting tomcat

By: Vineet Manohar

Vineet Manohar — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 21:41:38 +0000

Thanks for the feedback – I will highlight it in the main post.

By: moore

moore — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 19:34:06 +0000

Hi Vineet,

Useful post. It’s worth calling out a part of your comment to your post from the man page: “Note that there is a very small time slice between copying the file and truncating it, so some logging data might be lost. ”

Sometimes (often) that is acceptable, sometimes it is not.

By: Vineet Manohar

Vineet Manohar — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 17:17:18 +0000

You can also use logrotate on linux/unix machine to rotate catalina.out without restarting tomcat.
http://www.vineetmanohar.com/2010/03/24/howto-rotate-tomcat-catalina-out/

By: moore

moore — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 14:40:09 +0000

Hi Jinto,

I think the answer is to manipulate DOM object, just like I describe manipulating a Properties object here: http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/000238

doConfigure(String) might be a useful method too: http://logging.apache.org/log4j/docs/api/org/apache/log4j/xml/DOMConfigurator.html#doConfigure(java.lang.String,%20org.apache.log4j.spi.LoggerRepository)

By: jinto

jinto — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 12:50:30 +0000

hi,

I have a doubt in configuring in log4j….

i have seen your sample code of configuring using PropertyConfigurator..that works with log4j.properties…

i need to do the same with log4j.xml….

i have to make the filename dynamic using DOM Configurator…

do u have any ideas..
please send me a reply:jintothomasm@gmail.com

thanks
jinto

By: moore

moore — Wed, 09 May 2007 13:56:16 +0000

Oh yeah, if you’re a really anal sysadmin (and I wouldn’t want to work with any other kind), you’ll note that catalina.out is still growing–every time you restart tomcat, a new set of shutdown/startup messages is added.

To deal with this, I’d just modify the shell script that starts tomcat to rotate catalina.out during that short period of time where tomcat is not running.

However, in theory there’s no useful information in generic startup messages, so I might just delete the old catalina.out on restart, rather than rotate it.