Question

I am developing under Linux with pretty tight constraints on disk usage. I’d like to be able to point logging to a fixed-size file. For example, if my application outputs all logs to stdout:

~/bin/myApp > /dev/debug1

and then, to see the last amount of output:

cat /dev/debug1

would write out however many bytes debug1 was setup to save (if at least that many had been written there).

This post suggests using expect or its library, but I was wondering if anyone has seen a “pseudo-tty” device driver-type implementation as I would prefer to not bind any more libraries to my executable.

I realize there are other mechanisms like logrotate, but I’d prefer to have a non-cron solution.

Pointers, suggestions, questions welcome!

Answer 1

Perhaps you could achieve what you want using mkfifo and something that reads the pipe with a suitable buffer. I haven’t tried, but less --buffers=XXXXXX might work for this.